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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIR 



SUGGESTIONS OF MODERN SCIENCE 
CONCERNING EDUCATION 



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SUGGESTIONS OF MODERN 

SCIENCE CONCERNING 

EDUCATION 



BY 

HERBERT S. JENNINGS 

JOHN B. WATSON 

ADOLF MEYER 

WILLIAM I. THOMAS 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1917 

- All rights reserved 



. S 88 



COPTBISHT, 1917, 

By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and clcctrotyped. Published October, 1917. 



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OCT 25 1917 
©a,A476730 



FOREWORD 

The Joint Committee on Education was 
formed to arouse an intelligent interest in 
public schools. Its work was threefold : to 
secure newspaper publicity for educational 
topics, to encourage school visiting based on 
recent school surveys and a study of experi- 
mental schools, and to seek what new light 
on the subject might be obtained from modern 
science. 

Some mothers whose daily care of little 
children during the years when they were 
acquiring knowledge and developing their 
powers naturally, instinctively, were con- 
vinced that school hampered rather than 
helped them. They argued — if "sensation 
tends toward motion," why, during the years 
when life is largely sensation, do we screw 
our children into desks five hours a day; if 
variety of type is desirable, why strive for 
uniformity; if surplus energy is necessary 
to further evolution, why not conserve that 
wonderful superabundant vitality of child- 
hood.^ Might not biology, psychology, psy- 



vi FOREWORD 

chopathology, sociology offer suggestions con- 
cerning a school program which should secure 
physical, mental and moral health, and the 
development of individual initiative and crea- 
tive power ? 

The committee feel in duty bound to share 
with all parents and teachers the remarkable 
series of papers written in response to their 

need. 

E. S. D. 

For the Committee, 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Biology of Children in Relation to Educa- 
tion Herbert S. Jennings 1 

Practical and Theoretical Problems in Instinct 

AND Habits .... John B. Watson 51 

Mental and Moral Health in a Constructive 

School Program .... Adolf Meyer 101 

The Persistence of Primary-group Norms in Pres- 
ent-day Society and Their Influence in Our 
Educational System . . William I. Thomas 157 

Modern Conceptions of Mental Disease 

Adolf Meyer 199 



Vll 



THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN IN 
RELATION TO EDUCATION 



BY 

HERBERT S. JENNINGS 

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 



SUGGESTIONS OF MODERN 

SCIENCE CONCERNING 

EDUCATION 

THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN IN 
RELATION TO EDUCATION 

What can we do to help the children 
make their lives worth while, — worth while 
to themselves and worth while to the rest of 
the world ? 

This is the question with which these 
lectures deal. My part is to ask : What do 
we know about the nature of children, and 
what do we know about the rules of develop- 
ment, that will form a basis for our efforts? 
I am not to deal with the content of educa- 
tion, nor with the particular subjects that 
should be taught, nor with the methods of 
teaching them. For us at present educatioij 
will mean merely development : how best 
can we help the children to develop properly ? 

The details to be attended to are infinite 
in number, but these fall into a relatively 



4 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

simple system, and it is our task to bring 
into view the main lines of this system, 
so that they may serve as a guide as to 
details. 

We are so fiercely interested in our chil- 
dren that we can hardly see in their proper 
relations the facts that touch them; our 
hopes, our fears, our ideals, almost cut off 
our perception of realities. To get a truer 
view, it helps to look at such matters in a 
new and unaccustomed setting. This I think 
is why I, a zoologist, a general biologist, 
have been asked to open this discussion of 
children, — in place of some one whose daily 
work lies with children and schools, and who 
therefore knows much more about both in 
details than I do. What we are to do now is 
to study children just as the biologist studies 
a new group of animals or plants. How does 
the biologist go to work? 

If he is to get a really intimate knowledge 
of his group of organisms, he has to cultivate 
them, just as we have to cultivate children. 
If he is to cultivate them successfully, there 
are three main things that he must know : 

I. What is the nature of these organ- 
isms ? What traits and what capabilities has 
nature put into them at the beginning ? How 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 5 

do they resemble other organisms and how 
do they differ from them? How do they 
differ among themselves? 

II. What are the main laws of develop- 
ment, and how do they apply to these or- 
ganisms ? 

III. How are they and their development 
affected by things in the world outside? 
What conditions, what treatment, are neces- 
sary for their full development? 

Only when he knows these three things 
can the biologist hope to cultivate his or- 
ganisms successfully, so as to obtain the 
finest specimens. 

We must then study our children so as to 
get the answers to these questions. Now, in 
beginning the study of any particular group 
of organisms, there are two general princi- 
ples to be kept in mind. One is, that any 
group of organisms is in some respects like 
others ; so that the biologist who has studied 
other organisms would know something about 
children even if he had never seen or been 
one. The second principle is more important, 
because it is sometimes partly neglected. 
Every group of organisms differs in some 
respects from every other. In these respects 
therefore the biologist can know it only by 



6 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

studying this group itself. No matter how 
thorough a knowledge of snails the zoologist 
has, he will know very little about ants, un- 
less he studies ants. This second principle is 
most important in the study of children, 
for there is no organism that differs so much 
from other organisms as do human beings. 
The things that are of most importance 
about children must be known from a study 
of children, rather than from a study of other 
organisms ; and the same truth holds for 
human affairs in general. 

I. HEREDITY AND DIVERSITY IN CHILDREN 

We have then before us a flock of these 
organisms that we are to study — a school 
of children. Our first question was as to the 
nature and capabilities of these organisms, 
and how they differ from others. Taking 
the last question first, children differ from all 
other organisms in a way that immensely 
complicates the problem of how to cultivate 
them. To cultivate most organisms, it suffices 
to protect them from blights, to keep them well 
nourished, and to keep the temperature and 
other external conditions correct ; even so 
much is extremely difficult for many crea- 
tures. In the child all this must be done. 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 7 

but the chief difficulty lies in the fact that 
in the child there are the germs of an immense 
number of diverse capabilities not found in 
other organisms, which must all be developed 
if he is to become a man rather than a vege- 
table. The child must develop the power 
to meet an infinite number of diverse situa- 
tions ; the power to adapt itself to situations 
that it has never met. In every generation 
the requirements that it must meet are di- 
verse from those of any previous generation. 
Therefore the child cannot depend on a few 
instinctive ways of behaving, as other animals 
do — even those called higher animals ; the 
child must develop its ways of meeting situa- 
tions in close dependence on the situations 
to be met. This, as we have all heard, seems 
to be the reason why the child at birth is so 
incomplete in its powers, as compared with 
other creatures ; this is why it has so long a 
period of immaturity. Its long infancy and 
childhood are fully taken up in the slow devel- 
opment of those powers of adaptation which 
we call the mind ; those powers whose exercise 
is the main work of life. The child has a 
thousand things to develop where other 
animals have one, and this, for reasons which 
we shall see when we look at the rules of 



8 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

development, makes the problem of cultiva- 
tion extremely difficult. 

Examining more closely our flock of chil- 
dren, the most extraordinary thing that we 
discover about them is the astounding di- 
versity in their fundamental make-up ; the 
amazing variety of type that nature has put 
into the collection. No two look alike, nor 
like any specimens in any other collection 
of children. It is only in the past few years 
that we have come to know, as a part of 
organized science, that this is no mere matter 
of superficial appearance; the diversity is 
in their very foundations ; in their original 
constitution ; in the very fiber of their being. 
It lies as much in their capabilities and tend- 
encies, in their mentality and character, 
as it does in their physical features. The 
fact that perhaps strikes most the student 
of heredity is the astonishing pains that 
nature has taken to produce variety of type, 
and nowhere is this so striking as in human 
children. This is no mere speculative opin- 
ion ; it is a fact, a material fact, which forms 
a part of physiology, and can be studied 
just as can the digestion of food or the cir- 
culation of the blood. 

This fact of diversity of type at the very 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 9 

foundations of our being is so basic for our 
question as to what we can do with our flock 
of children ; and there is so much in education 
that looks like an attempt to undo what 
nature has done in this direction, that it will 
be best for us to look a bit closer at the matter, 
and try to form a picture of the real situation. 

Most, if not all, characteristics of living 
things, which show in one aspect as mental 
or moral or spiritual, show in another aspect 
as chemical and physical processes that can 
be observed. This plain fact does not imply 
that one of these aspects is more fundamental 
or important than the other; it implies 
nothing more than is implied by the fact 
which we all know, that in order to see, one 
must have eyes and the eyes must be opened. 
But what is true is that when we get to that 
stage of knowledge in which we can observe 
the physical aspect of any peculiarity, we can 
follow much more precisely what happens; 
we can determine the laws of development 
and action much more completely than when 
the physical aspect is hidden from us. 

Now of late men have gotten hold of the 
physical aspect of heredity ; the inner physical 
basis for diversity and for resemblance be- 
tween organisms. We find that there is a 



10 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

visible physical apparatus in which a great 
number of minute particles present the phys- 
ical aspects of the qualities which human 
beings show. We discover that as these 
particles are shifted and sorted, so in exactly 
the same way are the qualities of the organ- 
isms — the later physical and mental quali- 
ties of individual — shifted and sorted. We 
do not yet know all the details of the relations 
between the two sets of things — but we do 
know that. 

Now, we find when we study these things 
that nature has worked out a most ingenious 
and efficient device for getting all the diver- 
sities possible between children ; for so shift- 
ing and assorting the characters that no two 
individuals will get the same set. \ Looking at 
the physical aspects — the material particles 
which correspond to the qualities of the 
individual — we find that the device is some- 
thing as follows : All the characters — the 
particles — possessed by any person are ar- 
ranged in a set of small loop-like strings, 
24 in number. These 24 strings are readily 
visible ; they look somewhat like tiny strings 
of beads. When a new individual is to be 
produced, these 24 strings — each represent- 
ing a diverse set of characteristics — separate 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 11 

into two groups of 12 strings each ; one of 
these two sets of 12 goes into the new individ- 
ual. This division into two sets takes place 
in such a way that a different set of 12, a 
different combination — is given to practi- 
cally every different new individual. This 
set of 12 from one parent is then united with 
another set of 12, forming another combina- 
tion, coming from the other parent. No two 
of these unions unite the same two sets of 
characteristics. A more efficient device for 
preventing the occurrence of two individuals 
alike in fundamental nature could hardly be 
imagined. All the steps in the process are 
visible and can be studied in detail ; we can 
apply arithmetic to the matter and figure out 
at least the minimum number of diverse com- 
binations that may be produced by any two 
parents. In man, with the 24 diverse sets 
of characters, any single individual may pro- 
duce 4096 different combinations of charac- 
ters; and the number producible by two 
given parents runs up to more than 500,000. 
Any of these combinations is equally likely 
to appear ; that is, children of any of these 
thousands of different characteristics might 
be born to a given pair of parents. But as 
of course only half a dozen or so are actually 



12 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

realized, there is no chance for two alike, ^ 
and no one in the world can predict the nature 
of the few children that come into existence, j 
I wish to emphasize a bit this last statement. 
Men of science are very naturally so inclined 
to emphasize what we know and what we can 
predict as a result of our scientific knowl- 
edge, that they sometimes forget to emphasize 
important things that we do not know and 
can not predict. And one of the positive 
results of science — one of the results that 
is permanent — is that it is not possible to 
predict the combination of characteristics 
that will be produced by any two parents. 
Some single points you can indeed predict if 
you know the parents and grandparents 
sufficiently well, — a few things like color of 
eyes and hair, — but the combination of 
characters — even of the physical ones — 
cannot be predicted ; and as for the mental 
characters, which depend on the interaction 
of many factors, — prediction of these is 
quite out of the question, save as a matter 

1 In rare cases, after the new combination has been formed, it 
divides into two in such a way that each of the particles divides 
into two, and the two halves are therefore just alike. These two then 
develop into what we call identical twins ; the indications are that 
these are really as identical in their fundamental make-up as in their 
appearance. These are the exceptions to nature's rule of diversity. 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 13 

of general probability. To be able to know 
beforehand from the characteristics of the 
parents what will be the characteristics of 
the offspring has long been one of the dreams 
of science ; but, to paraphrase the words of 
the poet, ''now we know that we never can 
know" how to do that, in man, — for the 
characteristics of the parent do not determine 
what combination of characters shall appear 
in the offspring. 

This fact appears to me one of the big ones, 
yet I have never seen it mentioned in any 
of the numerous books on heredity in man. 
It is a fact that may come as a hope and 
comfort to parents whose own lives have not 
gone as they wished, and who wonder if 
heredity condemns their children to the same 
failure as themselves. A mother, the father 
of whose children had shown fatal weaknesses, 
asked me if I believed there was anything in 
heredity ; what she meant to ask was whether 
her bovs must be like their father. There 
is no one on earth that can predict what 
combination of qualities will come from the 
union of any two normal individuals, and 
there never will be. "Who toiled a slave 
may come anew a prince" in the next genera- 
tion, — by. the working out of recombinations 



14 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

in heredity. However unworthy we may feel 
ourselves to be, we can always hope for our 
children — with hopes based upon the knowl- 
edge that science gives. Knowledge of these 
open possibilities must inspire our efforts to 
help our children unfold what is in them ; and 
must lend an interest to their progress that 
any false belief in a set and iron law of in- 
heritance would crush out. The literally in- 
exhaustible variety of possibilities offered by 
nature realizes for practical purposes the ideal 
of freedom of the will ; realizes in effect the 
dream that there are unlimited possibilities 
for any individual. 

Looked at from the obverse, this knowl- 
edge is equally important. Superior parents 
^ have no guarantee that their children will be 
superior. No one can predict the qualities 
that will arise from their combination, for 
millions of possibilities are equally open. 
Superior parents must watch and help their 
children with the same anxious care that 
others must use. 

Of course we know that gifted parents are 
much more likely to produce gifted children, 
— inferior parents inferior children. But it 
is a matter of averages when large numbers of 
cases are considered. No parent has a *'sure 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 15 

thing" in his children, either for good or ill; 
all may hope and all must fear.^ 

Nature then has expended all her ingenuity 
in making our little flock of children as di- 
verse as she possibly can ; in concealing 
within it unlimited possibilities which no one 
can define or predict. It sometimes seems as 
if we their parents in our process of educat- 
ing them were attempting to root out all these 
diversities, to reduce our flock to a uniform 
mass. Now, there are several things to be 
said as to this. First, you can't do it, unless 
your procedure is so radical as to reduce 
them all to mere stupidity or lifelessness. 
Second, the only way that appreciable prog- 
ress can be made in the attempt is by cut- 
ting off, stunting, preventing the develop- 
ment of the special and distinctive qualities 
of the individuals. Unfortunately, this can 
be done to a certain extent, but only by a 
process which may rightly be compared with 
the taking of human life. But why should 
we desire to do this.^ Is it not variety of 
powers and character that the world needs? 

* It should be added, to avoid misunderstanding, that in certain 
fully abnormal human beings, such as the feeble-minded, it can be 
predicted (in certain cases at least) that the children will be like the 
parents in that abnormality. But these cases do not touch personally 
the normal human beings that are sending their children to school. 



16 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

Does not society become steadily more and 
more diversified, needing in every nook men 
of special powers ? Is not a world of variety 
intensely more interesting, more worth living 
in, than a world of monotonous uniformity ? 
Is it not the variety of human beings that 
makes life entertaining ? Or to put the matter 
from the point of view of the individual — how 
will your son become successful and happy 
— by being just like all the other sheep in 
the flock, — or by developing capabilities that 
others have not? You can be certain that 
he starts with a combination of qualities 
that no one else has; shall he not have the 
advantage of developing these for all they 
are worth ? 

I believe that all the world would answer 
this question Yes! And yet the world has 
developed a system of education which, 
until recently, and to a considerable degree 
yet, tends to the suppression of individuality. 
How did this contradiction arise ? Its source 
I believe is not wrong ideals nor mere per- 
versity, but, as in most cases of wrong action, 
a misunderstanding of the facts. Our schools, 
like much else in society, have been based on 
a false idea of the meaning of democracy; 
on the theory that democracy means that 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 17 

all human beings are essentially alike. Hence 
a single impersonal method of treatment 
was considered possible for all cases. And 
until lately science could not speak the posi- 
tive word necessary to place that theory with 
the theory that the earth is flat. But the 
time has come when biological science can 
assert positively that all individuals are 
diverse in their underlying constitution ; ^ and 
can give the detailed specifications on which 
that assertion is based. Any system, be it 
of education or of medicine or of politics, 
that does not recognize this fundamental 
fact must go into the discard. Democracy,! 
correctly understood as the freedom of each 
individual to develop the peculiar capabili- 
ties that are in him, is precisely what educa- 
tion requires. 

The practical dijBSculty of handling a large 
number of children individually has of course 
aided powerfully this false theory. Many of 
the faults of our education are based on no 
theory whatever, but upon mere conven- 
ience. 

* With the exception of identical twins, as mentioned in an earlier 
note. 



t 




18 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

II. THE RULES OF DEVELOPMENT 

To sum up SO far, we must then see in our 
flock of children a set of diverse organisms, — 
each endowed by nature with his own com- 
bination of powers ; each with something 
that no one else possesses. We agree that 
what we must do is to preserve this variety ; 
assist each child to so develop as to keep the 
advantage which nature has given him, — 
an advantage which need not injure his 
fellows, for their advantage lies in other com- 
binations. How shall we proceed ? 

The most important thing at first is to 
merely let their endowments blossom ; let 
them unfold and show themselves for what 
they are, and with a vigor that^ shall make 
them avail. And to do this is to first make 
the children stout little animals, that can 
exercise their capabilities with full force; 
and that can resist the blights which hover 
ready to pounce upon them from every corner 
of the world. 

Two separate but related matters here 
deserve consideration : 

(1) No matter what combination of quali- 
ties nature has given to the child, if he has 
not the force, the physical means, for making 
it avail, it will help him little, for he will be 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 19 

like the hapless speaker whom we have all 
suffered under, — the man who possibly has 
excellent things to say, but who through 
weakness of voice cannot make them carry 
to his audience, so that they are wasted. 
An idea that flits through the mind of a 
weakling is nothing when compared with 
that same idea in the mind of a man with 
driving power ; in the former it is a shadow, 
in the latter it may alter the world. 

(2) Similarly, no matter what combina- 
tion of qualities forms the child's endowment, 
if these qualities do not develop ; if they 
fall under any one of the blights that lurk 
for them ; if the right conditions for their 
development are not given, the endowment 
will come to naught. 

In most grown-up human beings many of 
the inborn capabilities have been cut off; 
much of the native driving energy has been 
repressed ; much of the natural delight in 
work has been destroyed. The instinct of 
workmanship, as Veblen calls it, is one of the 
strongest that nature gives us, but many 
human beings have been so crippled that it 
is gone, and is replaced by a hatred for work. 
Heredity is, correctly considered, simply an 
inborn wa^ of developing and acting under 



20 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

certain conditions ; if the required conditions 
do not appear, heredity alone will not give 
you the endowment. What we next seek then 
is to know the conditions which will bring 
about the unfolding and vigorous development 
of what nature has concealed in the child. 

In searching for these conditions, three 
important general rules of development must 
be our constant guides. These three I may 
call (1) the rule of the gradual and spon- 
taneous development of the powers ; (2) the 
interdependence of the physical and the 
mental; (3) the rule of "attention" in 
physiology and development. 

(1) The first rule is one which grown-up 
human beings in many respects ignore, to 
the great injury of the children. Much of 
the power gained by the young human being 
as the years pass is not brought to him pri- 
marily by training, by learning, by the exercise 
of the particular faculty involved, — but is 
a mere consequence of unhindered healthy 
development. After the child reaches a cer- 
tain stage of development, it can do easily 
and quickly what it could not do even with 
much training at an earlier stage ; and this 
silent unfolding may and should continue 
l^hroughout life. Training is even harmful 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 21 

when it comes earlier than the development 
of the power which it tries to train ; it must 
then be classed with the blights which cut 
ofiF the development of the powers. To take 
a simple but familiar example, it is quite 
impossible to train children at an early age 
to do so easy a thing a^ to sit still; they 
have not developed the power of inhibition 
required for this. Later they develop this 
power and have no difficulty in the matter, 
even though not trained to do it. This is 
a type of what occurs throughout develop- 
ment. This principle of the gradual spon- 
taneous development of power, with its prac- 
tical consequences, is one which the teacher 
or parent must have continuously in mind, 
if he is not to be misled into serious errors. 

The situation here is much like that which 
gives rise to so much sincere fraud in medical 
practice. We train the child; we "keep him 
at his books," and he develops power, — just 
as the doctor gives his patient drugs, and the 
patient recovers. But in both cases it is 
largely nature that has done the work, and 
indeed often in spite of the confinement at 
the books, or of the doctor's drugs ; without 
these things indeed the development of power 
in the child might have been greater, or the 



22 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

recovery of the patient more rapid. Of 
course I do not mean to imply that proper 
exercise of the powers, that proper training, 
is not necessary at the right stage ; with this 
we are to deal later. But what we must 
first see to is that the development of the 
powers shall take place in a healthy way, so 
that none are blighted, and so that there is 
force behind all of them. 

(2) And this leads to our second rule of 
development. The outward evidence of the 
natural and complete unfolding of the young 
child is given in its physical development. 
The practical rule which we must follow is 
to keep the little creature growing, physically 
developing in a healthy way. Our method 
of education has been largely influenced by 
one of the most malignant of the supersti- 
tions of the dark ages ; by the idea that 
spiritual and intellectual development is in 
conflict with physical development ; that the 
elevation of the mental requires the debase- 
ment of the physical. We know now, as 
we know any other fact of science, that this 
is cruelly false. The physical and mental 
are bound together in their development; 
whatever metaphysical theories we hold, they 
are ^practically diverse aspects of one and the 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 23 

same thing; if you change one you change 
the other; if you blight one you blight the 
other. This does not mean the dominance 
of matter over mind, any more decidedly than 
it means the dominance of mind over matter ; 
this is one of the good rules that works both 
ways. But in the young child we can more 
readily watch the physical side of things; 
control this more directly, so that its condi- 
tion must be the guide ; when it goes wrong 
all goes wrong. 

(3) Now to understand the conditions which 
bring about normal development of both the 
physical and the mental powers ; to under- 
stand the enemies and dangers to such de- 
velopment, we must have in mind our third 
rule of development, — what I shall call the 
rule of '* attention." If we can get a firm 
hold of this principle at the beginning, it 
will help much in grasping a great collection 
of facts and relations which at first view seem 
to have nothing in common ; most that we 
shall have to say about dangers and injuries 
form examples of this rule. The principle 
is this : Throughout development and all 
activity, both bodily and mental, there holds 
a rule which is comparable to the ordinary 
rule of attention in the activities of the mind ; 



24 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

only one thing can he well attended to at once, 
(My expression of this rule is analogical, 
unanalyzed and not precise; but properly 
understood it will serve as a guide under 
many difficult circumstances.) It means that 
when the energy or the "attention" of the 
organism is thoroughly engaged in one ac- 
tivity, physical or mental, other activities do 
not prosper. All the details of our lives 
are examples of this, and particularly in child- 
hood are the examples striking. When the 
organism is taken up with intense emotion, 
particularly painful emotion, digestion stops, 
excretion stops, growth stops; respiration 
almost stops ; thought of everything else 
stops; almost everything stops save that 
which ministers to the affair with which this 
emotion is connected.^ Intense pain has a 
similar effect. So has intense mental applica- 
tion to a particular subject; the "attention" 
of the body as well as of the mind is taken 
from everything else ; digestion, assimila- 
tion, excretion, growth, sensation, all are 
cut down. The rule is one that works 
both ways, or all ways. While deeply en- 

* The intensely interesting book of Cannon : Bodily Changes in 
Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage, gives the full analysis of this aspect 
of the rule. 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 25 

gaged in digestion, we cannot think or 
work well ; and so of any other operation 
of our vegetative life. I have cited a 
few of the striking manifestations of this 
rule, but it is one that is operating at all 
times ; one that we must think of at all 
times in its relation to the development 
of the child. A steady pain or discomfort, 
as from diseased teeth or poor eyes, halts 
the rest of development, physical and mental ; 
and weakens the resistance to disease, in 
proportion to its severity and continuity. 
Anxiety, fear, unhappiness, whether result- 
ing from harshness of parent or teacher, 
or from other conditions, have the same 
effect ; mental and physical development and 
resistance are dragged back. Any derange- 
ment of one function takes the unconscious 
*' attention" of the organism to that, derang- 
ing the performance of other functions. Driv- 
ing the mental activities in directions for 
which development has not prepared the 
ground acts in the same way. Forcing too 
severe or too long-continued mental activity 
on the young organism halts the rest of its 
mental and physical development and lowers 
its resistance. These effects are not slight 
and hard to observe ; they are the main 



26 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

things that decide health and development 
in the child. Almost all that we have yet 
to say will be an illustration of this principle.^ 

III. THE CONDITIONS FOR DEVELOPMENT 

We have then looked at the endowments 
which nature provides for the children, and 
we have reminded ourselves of certain rules 
of development. Now we come to the third 
matter that anyone who cultivates organisms 
must understand, — the effect of the outward 
conditions and of different methods of treat- 
ment on development ; how these condi- 
tions interact with the endowments, in ac- 
cordance with the rules of development. 

We must first deal briefly with a number of 
requirements for development which are com- 
mon to the child and all other organisms, — 
the necessity for protection from blights; 
the necessity for proper nutrition ; the neces- 
sity for proper conditions of temperature, 
and the like. Owing to the much greater 
complexity and delicacy of development in 

1 An analysis into complex material, physiological processes, such 
as is given by Cannon (I. c), is of course possible for everything that 
I have classed as a manifestation of this rule, so that the rule is per- 
haps a mere mnemonic device for holding together many things that 
might otherwise seem unconnected. I believe, however, that it 
serves this purpose well. 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 27 

the child, proper conditions in these respects 
are still more indispensable than in other 
organisms ; they are foundational. After 
showing the relation of these to our problem, 
we will come to the conditions which are 
peculiar to the child. 

Conditions Common to the Child and All 
Other Organisms, 

1. Protection from Blights, Our school 
of children consists of delicate organisms full 
of budding capabilities. As these buds slowly 
open they are tremendously susceptible to 
blights. And the world is full of blights. 
In the dark ages men used to think of the 
spaces of the universe as inhabited by malig- 
nant beings, demons, that lay in wait for 
human beings, pouncing upon those that were 
unprotected, and destroying or maiming them, 
through what we call diseases ; the disease 
was a living creature and the way to get rid 
of it was to drive it out, as you would drive 
out a snake or a wolf. It is extraordinary 
how nearly science has forced us to return 
to such a doctrine. The work is full of living 
beings that prey upon human kind and partic- 
ularly upon children, blasting their budding 
powers, maiming them or stealing them away 
as really as the demons and elves and goblins 



28 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

of old were imagined to do ; only now we call 
them bacteria. These bacterial blights de- 
stroy thousands of the human buds, — the 
opening capabilities, — even when they do 
not destroy the child completely. We know 
them mainly in the so-called children's dis- 
eases and in other diseases, particularly tuber- 
culosis. These are the most direct, the most 
pitiless, the most swift, of the dangers which 
our children run ; if all our labor is not to be 
vain we must watch and combat these blights. 
But what is the effect of our usual method of 
education — our schools — upon these bac- 
terial blights? The school might from this 
point of view almost be characterized as a 
device for the exchange of blights; a device 
for delivering up all the children to all the 
blights that attack any one of them. We 
all know how this works in the epidemics 
of children's diseases. The worst of these 
bacterial demons is tuberculosis, and the 
best authorities tell us "that the school 
plays an astounding part in increasing the 
liability to tuberculosis";^ that indeed an 
actual majority of children contract tuber- 
culosis before the end of the school period. 
We must think of these germs as every- 

1 Terman, Hygiene of the School Child, p. 130. 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 29 

where, ready to seize upon the unprotected 
child. 

Now, of course, we cannot completely 
avoid this difficulty, for children must begin 
some time, whatever the peril to life or limb, 
to mingle with their fellows. But what can 
we do to reduce the danger as much as pos- 
sibles^ Of course we shall follow the direc- 
tions of the medical men as to the best way 
to avoid the bacteria which produce the 
blights, and as to staving off the attacks of 
the children's diseases as long as possible. 
What I wish to speak of is a still more funda- 
mental matter. The chief thing we can do 
is to keep the child's resistance high. The 
bacterial demons are everywhere, but one 
child they blight, while another blossoms. 
The difference is one of resistance. The 
time will come when medical practice will be 
directed even more to the keeping up of 
resistance than to avoiding or killing bac- 
teria. But what is resistance, and how is 
it to be kept high ? No one I think would 
claim that men yet completely understand 
resistance. But it is clear that resistance 
is due to an activity of the body in preparing, 
when attacked by enemies, substances which 
poison and destroy those enemies, without at 



so THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

the same time poisoning the body itself. 
And it seems to be the fact that for each 
particular enemy the body prepares a different 
poison, precisely fitted to destroy that enemy 
and no other. Now this is something that 
chemists are quite unable to do when working 
consciously, and you can imagine that it is 
a most difficult and delicate operation for the 
body. It is peculiarly subject to derange- 
ment in many ways, and the cost of derange- 
ment is death or severe injury. Particularly 
is it subject to that general rule of '' attention " 
which I gave above; if the powers of the 
body are too thoroughly taken up with other 
things; if there is continuous worry, fear, 
pain, hunger, cold, fatigue, nervousness, over- 
excitement, overstrain of any sort, — the 
delicate task of preparing a chemical which 
shall precisely resist the attacking germ 
fails ; the bud is blighted. What we can do 
then to resist these blights that lurk every- 
where, bent upon destruction, is just what we 
must do to provide in other respects for a 
complete and vigorous development of the 
capabilities that lie in the children; because 
the capability of resistance follows the same 
rules as do the other powers. The rest of 
our discussion is to be devoted to this matter 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 31 

of providing the best conditions for all-around 
development. 

2. Nutrition, If an organism is to develop, 
of course it must be fed. This seems so 
much a matter of course that it comes as a sur- 
prise to find how much trouble it gives to 
properly feed any kind of developing organ- 
ism that you are trying to cultivate. And 
children form no exception to this ; indeed 
the problem of proper nutrition turns out to 
be for them one of the most difficult of all. 
Malnutrition, says one recent authority on 
school hygiene,^ ''is responsible for more 
degeneracy than alcohol. The greatest prob- 
lem throughout childhood is that of feed- 
ing." The child, at least in civilized races, 
seems curiously inefficient in desiring and 
obtaining food of the right kind and in suffi- 
cient amount, and in properly assimilating 
such food as it obtains. The food habits 
and needs of the young child are rapidly 
changing as the months pass, and it seems to 
be almost impossible, both for the child and 
for his parents, to keep the adjustment ex- 
act. The result is that thousands of chil- 
dren, perhaps the majority, — even including 
great numbers from the well-to-do classes, — 

* Terman, Hygiene of the School Child, p. 98. 



32 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

are ill-nourished. And the consequences are 
most serious. Development is directly weak- 
ened or pushed into wrong channels. But 
still more serious perhaps is the effect of 
malnutrition in laying the child open to 
blights and to other dangers of a similar 
kind. Without proper nutrition the delicate 
operations necessary for preparing resistance 
to bacteria cannot be carried out; the de- 
fenses fail, and infections and other diseases 
are given the opportunity they seek; "mal- 
nutrition is the almost inevitable forerunner 
of tuberculosis, chorea and many other dis- 
eases," remarks Terman.^ The children in 
which malnutrition results from lack of proper 
food have been greatly helped in many 
schools by the supplying of even simple 
lunches. But more common perhaps is the 
malnutrition due to absent or perverted 
appetite, and this cannot be remedied by sup- 
plying more or better food, nor by urging or 
forcing the child to eat when it is not hungry. 
For here our principle of " attention " comes 
into operation in most marked degree. Appe- 
tite is precisely this "attention" of the organ- 
ism to food ; it is the condition in which the 
energies of the body are prepared to engage 

1 Terman, I.e., p. 99. 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 33 

effectively in the complex chemical opera- 
tions of digesting and assimilating the food. 
If the body will not attend to the food taken 
— and this is what happens when food is taken 
without appetite — the chemical operations 
go wrong, and the food changes to poison. 
This " attention" of the body to food we call in 
its outward and sensible manifestation appe- 
tite, but it includes also the complex and 
coordinated "attention" of a host of internal 
organs, going through a most complicated 
set of chemical and physical operations to 
take care of the food. Now this complex 
process is one most delicately poised; most 
easily interfered with, by the direction of 
the bodily "attention" elsewhere. Strong 
emotions of all sorts, and particularly such 
painful ones as worry, fear, anger, at once 
stop the processes ; the details of these matters 
have lately been thoroughly studied by phys- 
iologists ; ^ they are just as precise and def- 
inite as the fact that you can no longer see 
when the eyes are shut. Severe mental labor 
has the same effect; strain of any sort acts 
in the same way. Poor ventilation, and lack 

*See the recent books of Cannon, The Mechanical Factors in 
Digestion (New York, 1911), and Carlson, The Control of Hunger 
in Health and Disease (Chicago, 1916). 

D • 



34 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

of free activity, are found to have most marked 
effects in decreasing this attentiveness of 
the body and its organs to food. All these 
things thus strike at the very foundations of 
development. Malnutrition is to be com- 
bated in the same way as the bacterial 
blights, — by all the measures required for 
bringing about free and full development of 
all the capabilities ; that is, as we shall see, 
by relief from strain ; by happy play ; by ac- 
tivity in the open, and the like ; these things 
we are to deal with. 

3. The External Conditions. Besides nour- 
ishment and protection from blights, any 
developing organism must have the proper 
external conditions, particularly as to tem- 
perature, and the nature of the medium — 
air or water — surrounding it. In the time 
we have, little can be said on these, yet any 
sketch of the conditions required for develop- 
ment in the child or any other organism 
would be most imperfect if the place which 
these fill was not at least indicated by a few 
strokes. 

In any warm-blooded organism, such as 
is the child, the maintenance of the correct 
bodily temperature is an absolute necessity 
for the proper carrying on of the bodily work, 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 35 

and there is in each of us a most extraor- 
dinary and elaborate regulatory system for 
keeping the temperature at just the right 
point. But this system can work perfectly 
only within certain limits, and we all know 
for ourselves that it is necessary to aid it all 
we can, by proper clothing. 

A reduction of the bodily temperature, 
even though in but a part of the body, lowers 
the efficiency of all the bodily operations, 
including particularly a lowering of resist- 
ance to bacteria ; and also produces ap- 
parently a derangement of our apparatus for 
regulating the bodily heat. This is why cold 
is so great an enemy to the proper develop- 
ment of the child and of other warm-blooded 
creatures. One of the classic experiments 
in bacteria was that of Pasteur, by which 
he showed that cold causes decrease of re- 
sistance to disease germs, so that organisms 
which are cooled off are overcome by infections 
that ordinarily do not attack them. (Fowls 
cooled below their normal temperature were 
susceptible to anthrax germs, though nor- 
mally they are not.) This is apparently 
what happens in the condition known com- 
monly as a "cold"; many sorts of blights 
get a start in this condition, when without the 



36 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

cold the child would resist them. A harmful 
idea has been spread by the statements, 
sometimes made even by medical men, that 
"there is no such thing as a cold," for "what 
we call a cold is really a bacterial infection." 
From such statements the conclusion has been 
drawn that exposure to cold or drafts has 
nothing to do with this condition. There is 
absolutely no ground for such a conclusion, 
and experiment shows it to be false ; exposure 
to cold does lower resistance. Particularly 
have experiments shown that cold renders 
animals susceptible to precisely such infec- 
tions of the respiratory tracts as are charac- 
teristic of "colds." We must therefore con- 
clude that the common name of "colds" for 
this condition was most aptly chosen, point- 
ing as it does to one of the chief dangers 
from which such conditions of low resistance 
arise. In such conditions we must have ever 
in mind the germs of tuberculosis and other 
diseases which are hovering about to take 
advantage of such periods of low resistance. 
Keeping the bodies of children properly pro- 
tected and at the normal temperature is 
one of the fundamental things demanded for 
development and for proper carrying out of 
all bodily functions ; neglect of this is bound 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 37 

to stunt development and at the same time to 
open wide the doors to the bacterial blights 
which destroy so many of the budding capa- 
bilities of our flock of children. 

Closely related to this is the matter of 
ventilation. An extraordinary change in our 
knowledge of ventilation has been brought 
about by recent systematic experiments upon 
it. The matter has perhaps not been cleared 
up, but we have learned that our old ideas 
as to the cause of the need for ventilation, 
and of the evils of poor ventilation, were 
quite mistaken. It appears again to be really 
largely a matter of temperature, with certain 
complications. The effects of poor ventila- 
tion are not mainly due to the lack of oxygen, 
nor to the increase of carbon dioxide, nor to the 
presence in the air of poisons given off by the 
body. On the contrary, the chief troubles 
in poor ventilation seem to be : (1) a high 
and uniform temperature ; (2) a high degree 
of moisture in the air ; (3) lack of movement 
of the air. What is mainly needed is that 
the air shall move about so as to carry away 
the warm moist layer next to the skin, — at 
the same time giving a stimulus to the skin 
through slight changes in temperature. If 
this is not done, the organism ceases to func- 



38 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

tion well ; the nervous system suffers ; atten- 
tion and work become impossible; the inner 
work of the body is attended to as badly 
as is the outer work ; the apparatus for 
regulating temperature gets out of order ; re- 
sistance to bacteria is lowered, and the most 
serious consequences may result. One of the 
most striking effects of poor ventilation is 
its effect in decreasing appetite ; that is, 
it causes the body to cease attending to nu- 
trition, and so attacks the very foundation 
of resistance and of development. The re- 
quired conditions are of course best met in 
the open air, where the temperature is cor- 
rect; and this appears to be one of the chief 
grounds for the great value of open-air schools 
— though it appears probable that in the open 
air there are other factors which science has 
not yet gotten hold of, that conduce to 
vigorous natural development. 

4. We must barely mention here the im- 
portant matter of the effect on development 
of direct physical injuries, such as those due 
to bad conditions in the teeth, in the tonsils, 
or the like. The underlying principle here 
is the one we have before set forth ; any source 
of pain or discomfort, besides possibly pre- 
senting an opening for infection, diverts the 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 39 

attention of the growing organism from the 
processes necessary for its normal develop- 
ment. We all know that this is true for 
mental development ; we cannot ** pay atten- 
tion " to things otherwise worth while, if 
we are in pain. It is equally true for the 
internal physical processes. Any source of 
pain or irritation diverts the bodily "atten- 
tion " from the processes of nutrition, of 
growth, of resistance, — bringing thus a host 
of attendant evils. Such troubles therefore 
require immediate remedy, if such is possible. 

IV. EXERCISE OF THE POWERS 

The things that we have thus far mentioned, 
— freedom from blights, proper nutrition, 
proper temperature and other external con- 
ditions, — are requirements which the child 
has in common with other organisms. But 
we set forth in the beginning that the child 
differs from other organisms in a way that 
enormously complicates the problem of cul- 
tivating it, for in the child there are the germs 
of an immense number of diverse and complex 
capabilities, which must all be developed if 
he is to become a man instead of a vegetable. 
Now, there can be no complete development 
of these powers without their exercise, and as 



40 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

a matter of fact our formal education is de- 
voted almost entirely to the training of these 
mental powers. The principles that should 
guide in this training form the subject of the 
second lecture in this course, by Professor 
Watson. But along with these adaptive 
powers, the child must also develop phys- 
ically, just as must a turnip or a calf. It 
must have a strong and normal body which 
can stand the strain of life, or the foundation 
is cut from under its intellectual powers. 
And this is what presents the great difficulty. 
Our general principle of attention holds here 
as it does everywhere; while the organism 
attends to one of its capabilities or functions, 
it cannot attend to the others; while it is 
attending to its mental development the physi- 
cal functions are cut down. In our eager- 
ness to develop its mental powers, we are 
inclined to overdrive these, with the result 
that the vegetative life is interfered with; 
nutrition is weakened, resistance is lowered ; 
growth slowed, and the very foundations of 
all life are undermined. 

There is no necessary conflict between 
the mental and the physical; on the con- 
trary, correct exercise of the mental powers 
undoubtedly assists physical development and 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 41 

conduces to health. But this requires that 
the two Hues of development should be car- 
ried on in continued mutual interrela?tiQn 
and dependence — not driving one regard- 
less of the other. The problem for solution 
is : How can we carry on efficiently the culti- 
vation of the higher powers, without at the 
same time interfering with the physical foun- 
dations on which they rest ? 

Several points appear to come clearly into 
view here : (1) The first is a general relation : 
in order to keep the proper balance, the part 
of physical activity in our system of cultiva- 
tion requires increase all along the line. 
Keeping the child sitting still for hours at a 
time, as we do in our schools, — and partic- 
ularly when this is done in stagnant air, 
as is usually the case, — has a most marked 
and immediate effect in decreasing appetite 
(and thus shutting off nutrition) ; in decreas- 
ing respiration, in decreasing resistance to 
blights, in a general suspension or slowing 
of physical development. These are not 
mere loose general statements ; precise facts 
and figures showing these effects could be 
presented if time permitted. The sitting 
posture when long continued is most abnormal 
and harmful for the growing child ; to de- 



42 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

mand it for many hours a day is a crime. 
From this point of view the changes re- 
quired in our system of cultivation are: more 
activity, frequent alterations of position, fre- 
quent periods of play or of moving about; 
more manual work in place of inactive study. 
But all these matters are closely interlocked 
with the points we are to take up next. 

(2) In exercising the child's powers, mental 
as well as physical, experimentation has come 
slowly and painfully to the same result which 
nature indicates most directly to each one 
of us. To develop any capability, there must 
be something comparable to the appetite 
that we find necessary for the proper nutri- 
tion of the body; the organism must have 
an appetite for its work. Such readiness to 
devote itself to the work we call interest ; and 
work done in this condition gives pleasure. 
One of the most striking things in the devel- 
opment of modern physiology is its gradual 
recognition of the great value of those pleasur- 
able emotional states which may be classified 
together under the abused word "joy," and 
of the harmfulness of the opposite emotional 
states — anxiety, sorrow, worry, fear, pain, 
and the like. The condition of happiness, 
of *' joy," is that in which development is 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 43 

unhindered, and flourishing ; in which the 
functions are proceeding harmoniously ; while 
worry, fear, unhappiness, are the marks of 
the reverse condition of affairs ; something 
is blocked and is going wrong. 

(3) Yet such is the complexity of our 
problem that interest itself may lead to 
danger. Too close and long-continued atten- 
tion to one function — too severe appli- 
cation to one task — necessarily leads to 
injury and block in the other functions ; 
and also to fatigue and exhaustion in the 
one carried to excess. The young child can- 
not attend long and intensely to anything, 
no matter how interesting, without injury. 
We have all heard the saying of the 
psychologist, that the dull and uninterest- 
ing teacher is a necessity in our schools, for 
the children could not possibly stand atten- 
tion to vividly interesting teaching for the 
whole school day. Close continuous atten- 
tion is a most exhausting activity ; children 
take refuge from the impossible strain by the 
frequent spells of inattention that so per- 
plex the conscientious teacher; by a secret 
diversion of their thoughts to play, or by mere 
vacuity of mind. We ought to recognize 
frankly this fact in the physiology of child- 



44 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

hood by shortening the periods of work along 
any particular line ; by suitable alternations 
of work with play or repose. I hope that in 
our lecture by the psychologist we shall have 
something bearing on this point. 

The difficulties and dangers are a hundred- 
fold multiplied when we try to drive the child 
into activities for which at the stage of de- 
velopment which it has reached it is not pre- 
pared, and for which it can therefore have 
no interest; or when we try to force long 
periods of activity upon budding powers that 
can stand but slight exercise for a few moments. 
We must remember our principle of the 
gradual development of the powers; some 
powers are ready for exercise when others 
are not, and only harm comes from trying to 
drive into activity those not ready. 

This driving of the powers beyond what 
they are prepared for leads to the most serious 
difficulties, particularly if the child is very 
conscientious or nervous, and so aids in driv- 
ing itself. Forced into this one channel, 
the bodily energy stops attending to its other 
duties. Appetite disappears; the body no 
longer can attend properly to nutrition; the 
chemical processes of the body get into con- 
fusion; poisons are produced instead of pro- 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 45 

tective substances ; resistance is broken down ; 
the bacterial blights gain a footing ; the 
nervous system functions badly. The begin- 
nings of such troubles are shown in the twitch- 
ings of the face or limbs that are so common. 
We hardly realize how close we keep our 
children in school to this precipice of over- 
strain ; many of us see even the manifest 
symptoms appear without realizing what 
they mean. 

Indeed, I believe that few of us really grasp 
the part played by strain in the life of human 
beings. It is strain that makes men and 
women hate their work, instead of loving it, 
as is natural. It is this that disgusts the 
young human being with the activities in 
which at first it was fiercely interested. It 
is strain that drives humanity to some of its 
most disastrous practices. It is now well 
recognized that the immediate physiological 
effect of alcohol is to release from strain and 
repression, and the obsession of humanity 
for alcohol is due to the fact that they will 
have that relief at all costs. The use of to- 
bacco again is due to its temporary easing of 
strain. It is this demand for relief from 
strain that leads to orgies of various sorts, 
in its minor aspects to outbreaks of profanity ; 



46 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

in more extreme cases to the tendency to 
**go on a spree" at intervals. All these 
matters have been elaborated recently in 
an interesting work by Patrick.^ 

In childhood the harm resulting from strain 
is enormously multiplied, since it cuts oflf 
in the bud the development of powers which 
after their unfolding and extension would 
form a great part of its life. The child 
must be protected from such overstrain at all 
costs. 

There is one method of the exercise of 
powers that is almost free from these dangers, 
and that is what we call play. For years 
play was looked upon merely as a sort of 
inevitable waste of time among children, 
but scientific study of the cultivation of these 
organisms has shown that play is in most 
respects the best, the ideal form of the exercise 
of the powers. Particularly is this true for the 
younger children, but it is in large measure 
true as they grow older. Play is the activity 
which their own natures suggest and guide ; 
it is varied as their diverse budding capabili- 
ties require ; and when free it is not carried 
beyond the point where one activity inter- 

^ G. T. W. Patrick, The Psychology of Relaxation, Boston and 
New York, 1916. 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 47 

feres with the development of others. The 
young child perhaps learns more and develops 
better through its play than through any other 
form of activity. Opportunity for varied 
play under healthful outward conditions is 
beyond doubt the chief need of children ; com- 
parative study of the mental and physical devel- 
opment of children to whom full opportunity 
for such play is given shows striking superior- 
ity, as compared with children to whom such 
opportunities are denied. 

Of course under the conditions in which 
we live it becomes necessary to direct many 
of the activities of the young, and these di- 
rected activities we call work or study. But 
at this point I begin to trench upon the field 
of the psychologist ; discretion warns me to 
leave the discussion of this matter to him. 
I could indeed present certain notions of my 
own, but they would lack the basis which I 
hope I may claim for my discussion thus 
far, so that I refrain. 

In conclusion, let us look for a moment at 
our present system of cultivation, — the 
school — in relation to these biological needs 
that I have tried to set forth. What is the 
usual effect of the typical school on the 
development of our organisms? 



48 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

A summary of the effects, taken from 
some sober standard textbook of school hy- 
giene, presents a startling list of evils. Such 
a summary of course deals with the average 
results; the usual ones. It is something as 
follows : 

Entrance to school stops or slows the 
growth of the child. Its sedentary life, bad 
air and mental strain, destroys or weakens 
the appetite, and decreases the respiration. 
Actual counts show a decrease in the number 
of red blood corpuscles, on which respiration 
depends. Hence the chemical processes of 
the body become disarranged ; malnutrition 
with all its attendant evils comes into view. 
Resistance is lowered; the bacterial blights 
are given an opportunity. Study shows that 
all sorts of morbid states increase greatly as 
the children progress further in school ; head- 
aches, nose bleed, eye troubles, insomnia and 
other nervous disorders become commoner; 
tuberculosis increases. Further, by continued 
repression of many of the powers, and by 
forcing activity in powers not yet ready, 
strain is brought about ; spontaneity is done 
away with; interest in work is destroyed; 
the instinct of workmanship rooted out, hate 
for work cultivated in place of love for it. 



IN RELATION TO EDUCATION 49 

No one maintains that these things happen 
to all children, but that there is a tendency 
toward such results no one .will deny. No 
one will maintain that these are all that the 
school does ; every one will admit, on the 
contrary, that the good done by the school is 
greater than all this evil. We cannot leave 
our children uninstructed. But the perti- 
nent question is — Is there any necessity for 
these evil effects along with the good ones ? 

The question must be answered — No ! 
The good can be done without the evil. 
Schools already exist in which most or all of 
the evils have been done away with. If 
accounts are to be trusted, in some of the open 
air schools the health and development contin- 
ually improve as compared with children not 
in school ; at the same time they make better 
intellectual progress. Schools are now carried 
on where individuality and spontaneity are 
cultivated, not repressed ; where strain is not 
allowed to play its fearful part ; where love for 
work, not hatred of it, is developed. The 
movement for increased activity in schools; 
for greater opportunity for play ; for shorten- 
ing of the hours of sedentary labor, is tremen- 
dously improving schools in the more ad- 
vanced communities. Time does not permit 



50 THE BIOLOGY OF CHILDREN 

my speaking of these. But the conditions are 
not hopeless ; on the contrary, there is full 
knowledge available for correction of the 
evil condtions wherever they exist ; all that 
is required is that people shall realize that the 
conditions are bad, and shall act to change 
them ; shall be willing to spend the money to 
change them. The great obstacle to better 
conditions is not that no one knows how 
to make them better ; it is rather a failure to 
realize that the conditions are bad and could 
be changed : perhaps also the fact that schools 
of the sort required cost more than the old- 
fashioned sort. But it is ourselves in the 
next generation that are at stake ; what is 
cost, compared to making our next selves 
healthful, efficient and happy ! 



PRACTICAL AND THEORETICAL 
PROBLEMS IN INSTINCT AND HABITS 



BY 
JOHN B. WATSON 

JOHN HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 



PRACTICAL AND THEORETICAL 
PROBLEMS IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 

Mr. Chairman, Ladies, and Gentlemen : 

I sometimes feel that the laboratory man 
makes a mistake when he emerges from the 
four walls which usually surround him to 
report his findings to those who have most to 
do with the practical problems of life. And 
yet however badly he may do it I am con- 
vinced that at least the investigator himself 
profits by being afforded the opportunity to 
put his results before representative and 
interested gatherings. After all, it is such 
occasions as this that determine which groups 
of scientific data are worthy to live and 
which should be returned to the laboratory 
for further w^ork and elaboration. 

SOME GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 

Most of our biological and psychological 
problems now center in the processes of 
growth and development in particular organ- 
isms, and especially around the methods of 

53 



54 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

predicting, controlling, and regulating such de- 
velopment. The theory that I have advo- 
cated for many years is that psychology, when 
all is said and done, is a study in behavior; 
that the problem of the schoolroom and of the 
laboratory is to find out what an individual 
can instinctively do, what he can be trained to 
do, and the methods which will lead him most 
easily and quickly to do both those things 
which society demands of him and the things 
which he alone as an individual can do. 
Behavior is thus the central problem. 
Thought can be safely left to take care of itself 
when safe methods of regulating behavior 
can be obtained. What a man thinks is only 
a reflection of what he does. This seems like 
a rather radical statement, but you will 
admit with me that society's estimate of 
character is based upon objective factors; 
namely, upon what deeds the individual does 
during the brief span of his life. The goal 
the psychologist should strive for is to so 
familiarize himself with processes that govern 
behavior or conduct that : (1) given the oppor- 
tunity to observe what an individual is doing 
he can predict the situations or factors which 
have led to that line of conduct, and (2) on 
the other hand, if it is demanded by society 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 55 

that a given line of conduct is desirable, the 
psychologist should be able with some cer- 
tainty to arrange the situation or factors which 
will lead the individual most quickly and with 
the least expenditure of effort to perform that 
act. The point of view which I have thus 
given in the barest outline is the essence of 
behaviorism or behavioristic psychology. 
This branch of psychology teaches that a man 
is the sum of his instincts and his habits. 
Since instincts and habits are thus all impor- 
tant, it is in these fields that behaviorism finds 
most of its problems. I venture to-night to 
bring to your attention some of the experimen- 
tal results which we are in the process of obtain- 
ing, some which we hope to obtain, and some 
which we have already been able to obtain. 
Without further preface I invite you to follow 
me for a time into the behavior laboratories. 

THE FEASIBILITY OF STUDYING INSTINCT AND 
EMOTION IN INFANTS 

After having devoted some fifteen years to 
the study of the instinctive reactions in 
animals, it occurred to the members of our 
laboratory that it might be well to look over 
the field of human instincts and emotions to 
see whether in our opinion psychologists and 



56 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

students of education had enough experi- 
mental data in this fundamental realm to 
afford a safe basis for guiding and shaping the 
child's career along vocational and individ- 
ualistic lines. After our survey of this litera- 
ture we came to the conclusion that our actual 
knowledge in this most important field is 
extremely meager. Probably not more than 
six or eight children have been studied with 
any degree of care from birth to the age of 
five or six years, and yet it is in this period 
that the lines of conduct are laid down which 
inevitably shape the child's relations to its 
future environment. Most of these studies 
have been carried out by parents, or by other 
interested relatives. It is hard for such 
interested individuals to assume the right 
attitude. They are used to observing the 
behavior of adult individuals and conse- 
quently read into the actions of the child, 
factors which belong only to the activity of 
the adult. (I am not unaware of the great 
work which has been done in the field of the 
juvenile court ; for the women delinquents at 
Bedford Hills, etc. We are likely, though, 
in our interest in the darker side of humanity, 
to forget the normal and super-normal 
child.) So convinced have we become of 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 57 

the importance of learning the inborn heredi- 
tary nature of the child — its possibilities 
of action, the native situations which bring 
out these actions, and the method by which 
these crude and imperfect responses can 
be transformed into serviceable habits — 
that we have temporarily given up our work 
upon animals and are devoting our time and 
energy, and a large part of the equipment of 
our laboratory, to the study of the emotions, in- 
stincts and early habits of the human infant. 

Before discussing any of our experimental 
work I should like to say in general that the 
human infant is not the hothouse plant that 
it is supposed to be. Continued observation 
by a trained and sensible experimenter is 
feasible and does not do the child the slightest 
harm. We have had several hundreds of 
newborn infants under observation in our 
laboratory at Hopkins. There has never 
been the slightest accident under experimenta- 
tion nor have the babies suffered the slightest 
ill health from the continued observations. 

While it would be taking us entirely too 
far afield for me to present very many detailed 
statements of the various problems which we 
are attempting to solve in this most fascinat- 
ing realm, I should like to illustrate our work 



58 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

by giving some concrete cases. As is well 
known, some previous observations tend to 
show that the child at birth will grasp a small 
stick and cling to it, but so far these observa- 
tions have led to very little experimentation. 
Our own work shows that if the stick is raised 
the infant will cling to it for a longer or shorter 
time and with greater or less strength. Some 
of them, indeed, will cling to the stick until 
they are raised up completely in the air and 
will hang on for an appreciable length of time. 
Others have not the instinct so highly de- 
veloped and will let loose long before they are 
supporting their full weight. In the photo- 
graphs on page 59 we show the method by 
means of which we register the full amount 
of the strength of the pull. In the diagram 
on page 61 we show the results of a very 
large number of observations. You will see 
from the chart that most of the children 
during the first twenty days of their lives can 
support their full weight with either hand. 
After a time, in normal cases, this reflex gives 
way ; it is said to disappear. Later observa- 
tions show that this reflex persists for the 
first three months of life at least. Occasion- 
ally we find the instinct weak or lacking. 
In some one hundred supposedly normal cases 




Apparatus showing methcd by which the strength of the grasping re- 
flex is measured. The baby is laid in the canvas crib. The weight 
of the baby immediately registers. The rod is then put in the 
baby's hand and raised. The decrease in the weight registered 
shows the strength of the pull. 



1 


«r f 


19!^^^^^^^^^' 




mm *»^ 



Method in operation. 



60 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

we have found two children who did not 
possess the reflex : one was extremely fat, and 
clinging would have been almost impossible ; 
no reason can be assigned in the other case. 
In abnormal cases, cases of malnutrition, the 
child has not sufficient strength to support its 
weight. It is just possible that in feeble- 
mindedness and in other defects this instinct 
persists for a much longer period of time than 
in normal cases. We have by no means fin- 
ished our study upon this interesting instinct. 
I am interested for the moment merely in 
showing you what very definite types of 
experimental observation can be carried out 
upon the newborn child. 

The study of this instinct alone is opening 
up a wide series of problems. For example, 
we find that the infants cling for a longer 
period of time with one hand than with the 
other, thus giving opportunity for the study 
of right- and left-handedness from infancy, 
something which has not hitherto been at- 
tempted. And the observation of this has led 
us into devising apparatus by means of which 
the spontaneous movements of the two hands 
can be recorded from the birth of the child. 
Along with these studies of right- and left- 
handedness there goes a careful and system- 



STRENGTH OF Q RASPING iR£FLEX 



mvtwttQMn 






ftj 






— • totrtrtifm 



mmtetrrjvtntmomm 



^2et 



fU) 



tiS) 






(ti 



ft)' 



Curve showing strength of the grasping reflex in the right and left hand 
of infants. The vertical line shows the weight in grams, the hori- 
zontal line shows the age in days. 

(The apparatus and curves shown in these cuts were made in collaboration 
with Dr. J. J. B. Morgan of Princeton University. The total results are as yet 
unpublished.) 



62 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

atic record of the way the child has been 
carried in the uterus. By such methods we 
hope shortly to attack the rather insistent 
problem of handedness. It is not necessary 
for me to point out the significance of deter- 
mining whether handedness is inborn or 
whether it is really a habit. It may possibly 
be found to be a habit which starts really 
before the birth of the child. We know that 
the two hands are not under equal constraint 
in the uterus. It is a real problem before 
us to-day to know what to do when a left- 
handed child enters school. If handedness 
proves to be a purely intra-uterine habit and not 
a fundamental instinctive and cerebral endow- 
ment, no serious consequences should follow the 
early changing of the habit. In the pursuit of 
this line of work we have already stumbled upon 
some intra-uterine habits, such as the "pre- 
ferred position " of the head, methods of holding 
arms, etc., all of which may affect our personal 
behavior and our peculiar type of adult action 
far more than we have any notion of at present. 
Along with these more detailed studies we 
are attempting to work over systematically 
the whole field of the early emotional reactions 
of the child. In regard to infantile emotions, 
I may say that, after a good deal of observa- 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 63 

tion, we find some grounds for the conclusion 
that in one way we have greatly overempha- 
sized the number of original emotional re- 
actions. I have been struck by their absence 
and simplicity rather than by their profusion 
and complexity. This does not seem to square 
with the multiplicity of emotional responses 
in adult life, but I shall try to show later that 
the contradiction is only apparent. We are 
inclined now to believe that the fundamental 
emotional reactions can be grouped under 
three general divisions : 

(1) Those connected with fear. 

(2) Those connected with rage. 

(3) Those connected with what, for lack of 
a better term, we may call joy or love. 

These at least deserve the name of major 
emotions. Whether or not other types of emo- 
tional reactions are present we cannot yet deter- 
mine. Let us glance for a moment at the orig- 
inal situations or stimuli which call them out. 

Fear. What stimulus apart from all train- 
ing will call out fear responses ; what are those 
responses ; and how early may they be called 
out ? The principal situations which call out 
fear responses are as follows : (1) To sud- 
denly remove from the infant all means of 
support, a^ when one drops it from the hand 



64 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

to be caught by an assistant. (In the experi- 
ment the child is held over a bed upon which 
has been placed a soft feather pillow.) (2) By- 
loud sounds. (3) Occasionally when an infant 
is just falling asleep the sudden pulling of the 
blanket upon which it is lying will produce 
the fear response. (4) Finally, again, when 
the child has just fallen asleep or is just ready 
to awaken a sudden push or a slight shake is 
an adequate stimulus. The responses are a 
sudden catching of the breath, clutching 
randomly with the hands (the grasping reflex 
invariably appearing when the child is dropped) , 
blinking of the eyelids, puckering of the lips, 
then crying; in older children, flight and 
hiding. In regard to the age at which fear 
responses first appear I can state with some 
sureness that with few exceptions the above 
mentioned group of reactions appear at birth. 
It is often stated that children are instinctively 
afraid in the dark. While we shall advance 
our opinion with the greatest caution, we 
have not so far been able to gather any evi- 
dence to this effect. When such reactions to 
darkness appear they are' due to other causes ; 
darkness comes to be associated with absence 
of customary stimulation, with noises, etc. 
From time immemorial children have been 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 65 

''scared" in the dark, either unintentionally 
or as a means of controlling them (this is 
especially true of children raised in the South) . 
In other words, fear, in situations other than 
the above, is due to bad training. Children 
thus learn to fear, through mishaps of training 
not always under the control of the parents, 
many things which they should not fear. 
Probably my own fear in the dark has made 
me particularly interested in this problem. 
My reactions in the dark are chaotic and more 
or less infantile. I determined to rear my 
two children carefully in this respect, and for 
four or five years they never hesitated to enter 
an unlighted room nor complained about 
being left in the dark. Unfortunately, while 
my wife was out for a short time one evening, 
a sudden thunder storm came up ; and for 
months there was great reluctance on the 
part of the children to being left in the dark, 
and there was exceeding great fear at a 
threatened thunder storm. That there are 
possibly other situations which originally and 
apart from all training call out fear reactions 
is quite within the realm of probabilities. 

Rage, In a similar way the question arises 
as to what is the original situation which 
brings out the activities seen in rage. Obser- 



66 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

vations seem to show that the hampering of 
the infant's movements is the factor which 
apart from all training brings out the move- 
ments characterized as rage. If the face or 
head is held, crying results, quickly followed 
by screaming. The body stiffens and fairly 
well coordinated slashing or striking move- 
ments of the hands and arms result ; the feet 
and legs are drawn up and down ; the breath 
is held until the child's face is flushed. In 
older children the slashing movements of the 
arms and legs are better coordinated and 
appear as kicking, slapping, biting, pushing, 
etc. These reactions continue until the irritat- 
ing situation is removed, and sometimes do 
not cease then. Almost any child from birth 
can be thrown into a rage if its arms are held 
tightly to its sides : oftentimes even if the 
elbow joint is clamped tightly with the finger 
the responses appear : at times just the plac- 
ing of the head between cotton pads will 
produce them. Even the best-natured child 
shows rage if its nose is held for a few seconds. 
Joy or Love} The original stimuli for 
bringing out the earliest manifestations of this 

1 For a more detailed statement of the stimuli and responses con- 
nected with this emotion, see Emotional Reactions and Psychological 
Experimentation, by John B. Watson and J. J. B. Morgan, Am. 
Jr. Psychology, April, 1917, pp. 163-175. 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 67 

emotion seem to be as follows : gentle stroking 
and soft tickling of the infant's body, patting, 
gentle rocking, turning upon the stomach 
across the attendant's knee, etc. The re- 
sponse varies : if the infant is crying, crying 
ceases and a smile may appear ; finally a 
laugh, and extension of the arms. In older 
children and in adults this emotion, due both 
to instinctive and habit factors, has an 
extremely wide range of expression. The 
original responses are very hard to observe in 
very young children. But certainly from 
seventy days on they are very easy to observe. 

While I wish to emphasize again that these 
three types of emotional expression probably 
do not exhaust the child's repertoire, yet I feel 
that they are more fundamental than any 
others we are likely to come across. When 
these emotions go wrong or are poorly con- 
trolled, we find the very greatest difficulty in 
starting and controlling that enormous body 
of habits which must be formed by every 
child. V 

Recent work in physiology tends to bear me 
out in the contention that these three types 
of reactions are of vital importance. It has 
been fairly conclusively shown that they are 
intimately connected with the functioning of 



68 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

the glands of internal secretion, for example, 
the adrenals, the thyroids, etc. 



THE PAST NEGLECT OF THE STUDY OF EMOTIONS 
AND A SUGGESTED METHOD FOR FUTURE 
WORK 

I have dwelt at some length upon the sub- 
ject of the early manifestations of the emotions 
because the whole subject of the infant's 
emotions has hitherto been neglected by 
psychologists, by parents and by teachers. 
The psychopathologist is the only investigator 
who has made any considerable use of this in 
his work. Our own experimental work is 
leading us more and more toward the view 
that emotions are not useless things put here 
by some unkind fate merely to disturb the 
even tenor of our ways, but that when properly 
controlled they can be made to serve practical 
uses. I think they can be made to serve as 
incentives or drives to many types of action. 
We stumbled only recently upon a good 
illustration of this view. In testing the 
grasping reflex in infants already referred to 
we found that in very many cases the child 
could not at first support its full weight, but 
if by hampering its movements we could produce 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 69 

rage^ the muscular strength suddenly increased 
and the child would immediately support its 
whole weight, and in other cases could sustain 
its weight for a much longer period of time. A 
possible explanation of this has been advanced 
by Dr. Cannon of the physiological laboratory 
of Harvard University. In the primary emo- 
tions certain internal glandular secretions are 
set free which tend to wash out fatigue prod- 
ucts from the muscles and to increase the 
amount of food for the muscles, etc. Hence, 
when in the throes of the major emotions, we 
do actually possess greater muscular strength 
and endurance than at other times. I shall 
not be so bold as to suggest this procedure as 
a safe one to follow in the schoolroom, but it 
does illustrate the point that emotions when 
properly used can be made to serve us rather 
than to destroy us. 

This illustration, narrow as is its applica- 
tion, serves to force the question upon us : Is 
there any experimental method now at hand 
for the utilization and control of the emotions ? 
Suppose we try to formulate just what we 
should like to do with the emotions. (1) 
Many of the tasks which the child has to do 
are intrinsically unstimulating, and yet such 
tasks must be learned. Furthermore, in learn- 



70 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

ing them great endurance is often called for. 
Now if emotions do furnish a "drive'' and do 
give increased endurance, our problem would 
be solved if we could in some way make the 
unstimulating task call out emotional activ- 
ity. (2) Again we find many children whose 
emotional life has been warped by improper 
training. Many objects and situations call 
out emotional activity where emotional activ- 
ity is neither called for nor needed. Our 
problem in (1) above calls for the attachment 
of an emotion, while in (2) above it calls for 
the detachment or breaking up of an emotional 
response. Stated more generally, then, our 
quest is for a method whereby we can both 
attach emotions to situations at will and 
similarly detach them from situations where 
they are not useful. I have not time at my 
disposal to go very far into the means by which 
such attachments and detachments can be 
brought about. Indeed, experimentation has 
not gone far enough to warrant any general 
presentation of a method. I cannot, however, 
resist the temptation to point out that the 
conditioned reflex method will possibly give 
us the solution. This method is a new de- 
velopment in objective psychology which has 
not had time to enter into the schoolroom. 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 71 

but it is now one of the central topics of 
discussion and experimentation in psychology. 
It has possibilities of wide application to 
schoolroom problems. I can only briefly de- 
scribe it. If our finger is suddenly pricked 
or shocked with an electric current, the finger 
draws back immediately — there appears a 
defensive reflex. Now a gentle sound, say 
that of a tuning fork, will not call out such 
defensive reflex of the finger. But if an 
experimenter sounds the fork and pricks the 
subject's finger simultaneously on several occa- 
sions, the sound alone will in time come to 
cause the finger to jerk back. 

In this same way certain objects and situa- 
tions in our daily life which originally have 
nothing to do with emotions come later to 
stir them up by the process of substitution. 
An interesting example of this is seen in the 
lightning flash. Many of us show fear re- 
actions to flashes of lightning. I have never 
seen a child show these reactions even to 
flashes of sunlight in a dark room. Loud 
noises, however, will produce the fear reac- 
tions even in very young children. The flash 
of lightning is usually followed immediately 
by thunder. Hence in a short time we begin 
to react to the flash of lightning as we would 



72 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

to the thunder. A stimulus which originally 
produced no reaction except a closure of the 
eyes now produces an extremely powerful 
reaction. The conditioned reflex thus serves 
to explain why it is that although the number 
of original emotions is very small, they still 
play, through habit ramifications, such an 
enormous role in adult life. Suppose there 
are originally only a few situations which will 
call out rage in me as an infant, for example, 
constraining my movements, holding my 
nose, etc. In a short time the mere sight of 
an individual who holds me badly or hampers 
my movements will set off the emotional 
reaction. Finally, more and more remote 
stimuli serve to set off the movements. In a 
similar way many thousands of objects and 
situations which originally had no intrinsic 
value for the arousing of our major emotions 
come finally to possess that power. 

You may think that I am setting up a 
distinction without a difference, but I assure 
you I am not : if we do possess, as is usually 
supposed, many hundreds of emotions, all of 
which are instinctively grounded, we might 
very well despair of attempting to regulate or 
control them and to eradicate the wrong ones. 
But according to the view I have advanced 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 73 

it is due to environmental causes, that is, to 
habit formation, that so many objects come 
to call out emotional reactions. If habit thus 
plays the most important role in the attach- 
ment of the emotions, it lies easily within our 
control to perfect and regulate and reshape 
and use practically the emotional life of the 
individual. My view throws a still greater 
burden upon the already heavily burdened 
parent and teacher and less upon heredity. 
But even so I think most of you will welcome 
any view which will put this important field 
under our control. 

In order that you may not think I am over- 
stating the case in regard to the early age at 
which such shifts in emotional responses may oc- 
cur, I shall give one or two specific cases chosen 
at random from a much larger number. In very 
young infants, far too young to have formed 
any extra-uterine habits with their hands 
(some as young as five to seven hours), I have 
tried several experiments of the following kind : 
As I have pointed out, infants cry or become 
enraged when the head is held. In one of my 
experiments when testing whether coordinated 
eye movements are present from birth, it was 
necessary to turn out the light and then hold 
the infant's head in a truly vertical position to 



74 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

see if its eyes would follow a faint experimental 
light. In a very short time the infant began 
to cry as soon as the light was turned out and 
before the head was touched. In another experi- 
ment while testing the grasping reflex on an 
eighty-seven day old child it was necessary to 
lay the child on a couch. When the mother 
first laid it down, it smiled and babbled. I 
then tested its grasping reflex, which threw 
it into a rage. The mother then picked it up 
and soothed it and once more made it smile. 
Then when she laid it down it immediately 
began to struggle and cry, and long before I 
came near with the rod to make another test. 
I have tried many such experiments with the 
same results, and I have come to the conclu- 
sion, possibly without sufficient experimental 
data, that the first few years are the all- 
important ones for shaping the emotional life 
of the child. We have hardly given this 
matter a thought in our educational systems 
or even in our home life. We have centralized 
on teaching the child proper conventional 
habits of study and conduct while neglecting 
almost entirely its emotional training. We 
look upon the infant before it begins to crawl 
and play with objects as an animal of a some- 
what mysterious and little understood nature. 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 75 

or else we consider it a plaything upon which 
we may shower our own too exuberant emo- 
tional life. In general, we too often misshape 
its emotional life by forcing upon it too many 
exciting emotional attachments and even 
harmful ones, such as fears, rages, etc. In so 
far as I have learned anything from my work 
on infants and very young children I should say 
that it shows, first, that parents, and, second, 
the early grade teachers, equally must share 
the responsibility for making or marring the 
emotional life of the average child. We can 
only gradually educate the general run of 
parents in this point of view, but we can more 
rapidly improve matters by making the posi- 
tions of the early grade teachers the most 
desirable and the best paid ones in our schools. 
When this has been done we must next secure 
exceptional teachers for those grades. If 
modern conditions would permit it, we should 
like to see these early grades given over to 
genuine students of child psychology — men 
and women who have specialized in psychol- 
ogy and psychopathology and who have made 
actual observations upon infant and child life. 
If the early grades were manned by these 
widely trained specialists we could be sure that 
many of the mishaps to the emotions due to 



76 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

home training could be corrected, and we could 
certainly be sure that from their entrance into 
the school system of our country no further 
mistakes would occur. 

My remarks may seem to throw criticism 
upon the grade teachers who are already nobly 
doing their best. I have no wish to cast 
stones, but I do wish to decry the tendency in 
our American schools to think that any teacher 
is good enough to teach young children. As a 
result of this tendency we find all too often 
grade teachers being recruited from the ranks 
of high school graduates, from inexperienced 
normal school graduates, and in some places 
at least even from among relatives of school 
officials who are graduates from nowhere. 

These highly trained specialists of the early 
grades could aid America's professional and 
economic life in another way. Vocational 
training is looming large upon the educational 
horizon. A good deal of it is crass and super- 
ficial. We know far too little of the bents and 
trends of childish activity. In order to put 
this work on solid ground the individuals who 
come in contact with the child must be trained 
to observe these bents and to devise situations 
in which such bents and vocation tendencies 
may appear. 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 77 

THE NEED OF AN EXPERIMENTAL NURSERY FOR 
THE STUDY AND CONTROL OF INSTINCTS, 
EMOTIONS AND EARLY HABITS OF INFANTS 

I see no way of gaining the information we 
so much desire except by the use of slow and 
intense experimental methods. We have been 
trying an easy way to find out how to shape 
development — that of making superficial and 
incidental examination of the children, of 
sending out questionaries, and of running 
them through the ubiquitous "mental tests." 
These easy methods have profited us little 
or nothing. At fourteen years of age, when 
the majority of children leave school, they 
have no measure of themselves and drift 
into anything and everything that offers. 
The sheltered college youth knows no more 
about his place in life at graduation than 
does the less favored boy or girl at fourteen 
years of age. As a possible way out of this 
dijSSculty and out of the many others that 
beset us, I suggest the establishment of an 
experimental nursery where fifteen to twenty 
children can be brought up during the first 
five years of life. These children should be 
kept under strict experimental conditions. 
Naturally the first things to provide are 



78 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

adequate housing, attention from well-trained 
nurses, and a physician's care. The child's 
activities, however, should be under the hourly 
observation of two or three well-trained psy- 
chologists who have had preliminary train- 
ing in animal experimentation and a good 
grounding in psychopathology. The function 
of the nurses and the physician would be that 
of caring for the physical comfort and develop- 
ment of the children. Their complete up- 
bringing during this period should be in the 
hands of the psychologists. A wealth of 
problems would be opened up and most of 
the questions which now agitate us and which 
we settle by theory could be answered by 
experimental results. I should hope to see 
grow up from such a nursery a fairly complete 
method of evaluating the behavior possibili- 
ties of children at, say, five years of age. Not 
tests of the Binet-Simon type but an experi- 
mental procedure which would give cross- 
sections of habits already established, of 
instincts and instinctive tendencies, and of 
emotional development and equipment. I 
have something in mind far more scientific 
and far more important than any material 
which can be gathered from the use of the 
so-called scales of measuring *' intelligence," 



IN mSTINCT AND HABIT 79 

however useful such scales may be. It would 
be strange indeed if the close observation of 
twenty children from birth to five years of age 
would not revolutionize the present point of 
view of child life, if it would not give us 
methods of determining instinctive bents, of 
experimentally controlling emotional life, and 
efficient methods of implanting habit forma- 
tion. With such a body of data before us we 
should be prepared to turn those twenty chil- 
dren into the hands of our highly competent 
grade teachers. We should furnish each child 
with a "reaction chart" to be placed in the 
hands of his first instructor. On this chart we 
should show the lines of activity which the 
child most easily follows, his particular bents, 
his emotional tendencies and how to strengthen 
or correct them, and the chief points in the 
systems of habits which he had put on during 
the five years' residence in the experimental 
nursery. With such a guide before a sym- 
pathetic and properly trained grade teacher 
the whole relationship between pupil and 
teacher would at once be altered. The chil- 
dren would then be looked upon as individuals, 
each one with a definite future before him, 
and the tendency would rapidly grow up for 
the teacher to regard each pupil as a "hopeful " 



80 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

experiment. At odd moments encourage- 
ment could be given in this direction or in 
that. This would serve to save our children 
from all being run through the same mould. 
All of them probably must be moulded along 
certain conventional lines — all must be given 
a certain amount of mathematical training, 
training in the use of language, etc., but I am 
inclined to agree with Dr. Abram Flexner that 
we can easily overdo in the matter of required 
subjects. We would not attempt to prescribe 
just what the child's curriculum should be, 
but we do affirm with a good deal of confi- 
dence that his individuality and tendencies 
should determine in large measure what we 
should teach him. 

You will probably smile at my naivete. 
Why go to such an enormous expense to try 
an experiment upon twenty children when 
millions have to be trained.^ But we must 
consider that with the enormous data and 
with the improved methods which we should 
get from this experimental nursery, we would 
be in a position to shape the establishment of 
infant laboratories in every important educa- 
tional institution in the country and certainly 
in the public school systems of our large cities. 
These laboratories would be at the command 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 81 

of the parents. Children could be brought 
in almost from birth for periodic examination 
and study. The mothers could be guided 
and warned about the way the children were 
tending to develop. The child's over-reac- 
tions, wrong emotional attachments, and the 
lines along which its habits were forming 
could be pointed out. The mother would 
thus get expert guidance and intelligent help. 
[I am speaking now for the normal child, if 
such a thing exists.] She calls for expert 
advice now from the physician when she is in 
doubt about the child's health. The school 
even now forces her to have her child mentally 
tested, if retardation is suspected. It is then 
often too late for advice. Why not afford 
her the opportunity of having the instinctive, 
emotional, and habit systems of her normal 
child gone over periodically so that she may 
receive at seasonable times advice in matters 
which may be as useful to her as the physi- 
cian's counsel now is.? But we must study 
child life during this period before we can 
give advice of a scientific character. Only 
a charlatan would presume now to give 
''expert advice." Not the least useful pur- 
pose of such infant laboratories would be the 
possibility of training our public school 

G 



82 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

teachers in the accurate observation of infant 
and child hfe. I venture to say that if I were 
to take a thousand teachers chosen at random 
from schools in the United States and put 
a two months' old infant in front of them and 
ask them to experiment upon it for a few 
days and then to write down the important 
things they saw, not five of them would know 
how to go about the task. And yet we expect 
our teachers to look after the instinctive 
bents and original characteristics of our 
children ! This is not their fault but the fault 
of the institutions which train them and of a 
society which permits them to teach instead of 
to guide the child's own development. They 
have had no opportunity to observe child- 
life in the making. But in my interest in 
this possibly visionary scheme I have been 
neglecting some other matters which I wish 
to put before you. 

SOME EXPERIMENTS TO DETERMINE THE LAWS 
OF HABIT FORMATION 

Equally as important as this early scrutiny 
of instinct and emotional training are the 
methods of initiating, correcting, and con- 
trolling the growth of habits after entrance 
into school. Let us not criticise the schools 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 83 

unduly for being conservative and loth to 
change their methods of implanting habits. 
I think though we can criticise any school 
system which is inclined to believe that the 
present system of school instruction is ade- 
quate and that it cannot be improved upon. 
Even the most satisfied school official must 
admit that our school curricula are now based 
upon conventions, and not upon science. 
Even the number of minutes to be devoted 
to a given subject and the number of days 
per week that each subject must receive atten- 
tion, as well as the number of subjects that 
must be taught simultaneously, are heritages 
from early times. These conventions may 
turn out to be not wholly bad. Certainly I 
should not advocate giving them up until 
science has something better to offer. I am 
merely imploring the schools to remain in an 
expectant attitude and to watch for our labora- 
tory results and to seize upon those which 
look promising. It has not been possible for 
us so far to find an opportunity for making 
an extensive study of habit formation in 
children because of the well-grounded reluc- 
tance one meets in trying out experiments of a 
radical kind upon the human species. It has 
been a case literally of trying these things 



84 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

out upon the ''dog," or rather upon the white 
rat ! I wish to present here four of the most 
important conclusions we have arrived at in 
our study of habit formation and then to 
illustrate these tentative formulations by 
citing the experimental data upon which they 
are based ; they are : 

(1) The law of diminishing returns from 
practice. Within . certain limits the less the 
frequency of practice the more efficient is each 
practice period. 

(2) The less the number of habits formed 
simultaneously, the more rapid is the rise of 
any given habit. At the same time the first 
law is valid here, too. 

(3) Again, within certain limits, the younger 
the animal, the more rapidly will the habit 
be formed. This law is to be taken with some 
reservation. 

(4) The higher the incentive to the forma- 
tion of a habit and the more uniformly this 
incentive is maintained, the more rapidly 
and the more uniformly will the habit be 
formed. Under such conditions the curve 
illustrating the growth of the habit will 
rise steadily. Whenever the incentive de- 
creases in intensity (oftentimes with the 
actual onset of boredom) there appear pauses 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 85 

and resting places in the curve (places of no 
improvement). 

Let us turn to the experimental justification 
of these conclusions. 

1. The Law of Diminishing Returns from 

Practice 

A few years ago we knew nothing concern- 
ing the way in which practice periods are 
related to learning. Scattering and incon- 
clusive experiments had been carried out in 
the schoolroom but the number of cases 
tested was too few for safe conclusions. In 
order to get a sufiicient number of subjects 
whose daily life was under our control we 
used white rats.^ Our methods were as 
follows : we took one group of animals and 
allowed each member to solve a specific 
problem once per day; the members of a 
second group were allowed to solve the prob- 
lem three times per day; and of a third 
group, five times per day. As soon as an 
animal could solve the problem — which was 
to open a simple latch box in two seconds 
without making an error — it was considered 
to have learned the problem, and its total 

1 These experiments were carried out by Dr. J. L. Ulrich. See 
Behavior Monographs, No. 10. 



86 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

number of trials before reaching this stage of 
perfection was counted. This procedure was 
adopted for all the groups at work. The 
results came out in a rather clear-cut and 
surprising way : those animals having one 
trial per day required very much fewer trials 
than those having a larger number. In other 
words, given the same amount of practice, 
it is far better to distribute that practice over 
a longer period of time than to concentrate it 
in ^ relatively short period of time, if we wish 
to get the maximum efficiency out of each 
practice period. These experiments were con- 
tinued further by letting a group of animals 
solve the problem once on alternate days, 
thus giving one day of rest between practices ; 
and by allowing still another group to have a 
two-day rest period between practices ; and a 
third group a three-day rest period. The 
maximum efficiency per practice was obtained 
in that group which had at least one day of 
rest between practice periods. Dr. Helen 
Hubbert of Randolph-Macon Woman's Col- 
lege is carrying out a similar experiment upon 
young women, which likewise shows the 
value of rest between practices. Her results 
are not yet published. 

Dr. Lashley of our laboratory has already 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 87 

made a somewhat similar test upon human 
beings.^ He used for this purpose the acquisi- 
tion of skill in archery. The archery ground 
was set up on the University campus. The 
subjects were all forced to shoot five hundred 
times; in other words, the total amount of 
practice was the same for all groups. The 
groups were all carefully selected, none of the 
subjects having had previous practice on the 
English long bow and all having about the 
same degree of initial efficiency. After each 
shot was made, the distance of the arrow from 
the center of the bull's eye was measured. 
The subjects were thrown into the following 
groups : one group had to shoot five times per 
day ; another twelve times per day ; another 
twenty; and the fourth forty. The final 
accuracy of the last twenty-five shots was 
chosen as a measure of the amount of improve- 
ment which had taken place. The results 
strongly confirm those already reported for 
the rat : the group shooting five times a day 
could shoot approximately twice to three 
times as accurately as the group having to 
shoot forty times per day. There seems to 
be no question but that this law is universal 
in its application. 

1 The Acquisition of Skill in Archery. Publications of Carnegie 
Institution of Washington, No. 201, p. 107. 



88 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

I think some practical conclusions may be 
suggested from these experiments. In the 
first place they show that we may utilize 
isolated bits of time in the schoolroom (and 
in the business world) for getting our pupils 
to acquire skill in directions which harmonize 
with their bent. We may work with the full 
confidence that the practice periods in these 
isolated moments will yield splendid results. 
The student ought to be encouraged to take 
half an hour each day, or even one hour a 
week, to perfect himself along some particular 
line towards which he is especially attracted 
— it may be in the playing of some musical 
instrument or in the perfecting of skill in some 
form of sport, in typewriting and stenography, 
photography, bookbinding, drawing, painting, 
etc., hobbies which he may have no time or 
opportunity to ride during school hours. The 
more of such habits an individual has at his 
command, the more safety valves he will have 
in time of trouble. If the student properly 
systematizes his out of school hours, he will 
find that he has more time both for work and 
for play. Personal efficiency does not mean 
that the individual needs to become cold and 
unlifelike. It does mean more satisfactory 
work and more time for the putting on of 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 89 

useful habits of work and the equally useful 
habits of play. ^ 

2. The Less the Number of Habits Formed 
Simultaneously, the More Rapid is the Rise 
of Any Given Habit 

In a similar way evidence was obtained that 
the smaller the number of habits an animal is 
learning simultaneously, the more rapidly will 
he learn each of the habits. The experiments 
were carried out by a method similar to the 
above. We first established a norm of learn- 
ing for three problems by using three different 
groups of animals. Each group was allowed 
to learn only one problem. We then took 
three other groups and forced them to learn 
the same three problems simultaneously. We 
wished to see whether law 1 held here also. 
Accordingly we allowed one group to solve 
problem number 1, once per day and immedi- 
ately thereafter problem number 2, and im- 
mediately thereafter problem number 3. The 
second group was forced to solve each of the 
three problems three times per day ; the third 
group had to solve each of them five times per 
day. Our results show fairly clearly that the 
group learning one problem at a time could 
learn more rapidly than any of the above 



90 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

groups having to learn three problems abreast. 
At the same time, we got a perfect demonstra- 
tion here also of the law of diminishing returns. 
The group solving each of the three problems 
once per day learned much more rapidly from 
the standpoint of the number of trials than 
either of the other two groups. So far these 
experiments have not been carried out on 
human beings in any conclusive way, but I 
have not the slightest doubt but that the 
same law will hold there also, at least for 
certain types of habits. The question arises, 
though : would we have had this interference 
if our problems had been different, or might 
we not indeed have found groups of problems 
which could be learned more easily abreast 
than in rotation .^^ Some very recent work 
on the human being tends to support the view 
that we may not only have no interference 
among acts which contain few or no ** identical 
elements" but that we may have actual 
facilitation. The search for non-conflicting 
and mutually facilitating habits, if such exist, 
must go on until we can be sure that we have 
the best possible selection of studies to be 
pursued simultaneously in each and every 
grade. 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 91 

3. The Younger the Animal, the More Rapidly 
will the Habit he Formed 

These experiments have been carried out 
mainly upon animals. One of our students at 
Hopkins allowed nearly one hundred animals 
of different ages to learn a very complex maze, 
taking the while an accurate record of the 
number of trials required to master it.^ The 
animals were divided into four groups : a 
twenty-five day old group, which is the age at 
which they become independent of the mother ; 
a sixty-five day old group, or the age of sexual 
maturity; a two hundred day old group, 
which might represent the middle of adult 
life; and a three hundred day old group, to 
represent the beginning of old age. The 
twenty-five day old rats and the sixty-five 
day old rats, which represent our most youth- 
ful groups, learned the maze in approximately 
thirty trials ; whereas the two hundred and 
three hundred day old animals required 
nearly a third more trials — about forty-two. 
The young animals required about six seconds 
for their finally perfected runs ; the old 
groups required about ten seconds. These 

1 The Effect of Age on Habit Formation. By Helen B. Hubbert, 
Behavior Monographs, No. 11. 



92 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

experiments show clearly two things : first, 
that, as everyone has hitherto suspected, the 
young animals do learn faster than the old 
ones ; but in the second place, that the old 
animals can learn very fast indeed, all things 
considered. We have continued these experi- 
ments with a few very old animals and we 
find that animals even five and six hundred 
days old still have the ability to learn this 
complicated maze. I think two things are 
indicated from these experiments if you will 
permit me to *' carry over" conclusions from 
the animal world to the human. In the first 
place they suggest that the earlier we can get 
a child to work upon a problem, assuming 
that he is of the general level to begin the 
problem, the better our results will be. This 
conclusion is, I should say, strengthened 
by the schoolroom observations of Baldwin, 
namely, that those children who enter school 
a year or two earlier, in general, maintain 
their lead and consequently graduate a year 
or two earlier. In these days of economic 
pressure this gain is not without its signif- 
icance. In the second place, I think these 
experiments should give those of us who have 
passed the first bloom of youth a good deal of 
hope. Many of us in that too often unfor- 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 93 

tunate condition say that we do not know 
how to dance, to skate, and to play games be- 
cause we did not learn such things when we 
were young; but this excuse is no longer 
valid. We now have experimental evidence 
to show that the contention of William James 
concerning the non-plasticity that is supposed 
to go with old age, which has been so uni- 
versally accepted, is completely unfounded. 
Any one of us who cares to put on the highly 
skillful acts needed in either work or play can 
do so provided he is willing to spend approxi- 
mately a third more time than a youth would 
have to spend in acquiring the same acts. I 
have been at some pains to verify this conten- 
tion by asking some of our better musical 
teachers whether they have ever had any 
success in teaching, for example, the pipe 
organ to people who are forty years of age or 
over. They tell me that their success has 
been surprising. One of my friends, jBfty 
years of age, is at the present time trying to 
learn to play the violin. If he succeeds in 
acquiring any degree of skill upon this instru- 
ment, I should predict that there is hardly 
any line of activity which will not yield to 
"middle aged" effort. James puts the fixa- 
tion or crystallization point at thirty. I should 



94 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

extend the point indefinitely. Convention 
has more or less frowned at middle age putting 
on so-called youthful habits : we look askance 
at a middle-aged individual who is trying to 
learn such acts. We say such a person is 
kittenish. I should say that here our conven- 
tions are wrong; that middle age and early 
old age would be much more exciting periods 
for all of us if we would only become willing 
to scorn such conventions and dare to learn 
whatever we please to learn. Fortunately, 
modern times show, apart from experimental 
laboratories, a rather pronounced move in the 
right direction. This is shown in the tend- 
ency of the middle-aged to learn the modern 
dances, to drive their own cars, to play golf, 
and, in general, to add other strings to their 
bows. I have been extremely interested in 
watching the spread of the modern dances. 
When these came in, the older members of the 
community took a rather scornful attitude 
on the side lines and were rather prone to 
condemn the *' immorality" of such dances. 
Two years saw a complete change in this 
respect, and now when I go to the cafes of 
New York I sit and watch with all amazement 
the middle aged and the aged giving no mean 
exhibition of the fact that the human race is 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 95 

never too old to learn. Such revolts against a 
playless and stereotyped old age ought to be 
encouraged by using our schoolhouses outside 
of school hours as places where parents can be 
taught to play. 

4. The Higher the Incentive and the More 
Uniform the Incentive, the More Rapid and 
Steady will he the Improvement 

We owe the work upon which this law is 
based to experiments which have been carried 
out in the psychological laboratories. Long 
ago Bryan and Harter showed in their studies 
in telegraphy that individuals working in this 
field very early reached a certain stage of 
development and then ceased to improve. 
These low levels of adjustment were due to 
environmental conditions.^ Most of the 
learners in telegraphy as soon as they become 
competent to send and receive messages in 
small stations cease to improve, in other words, 
they reach only the first level of adjustment 
which will just enable them to hold a job. 
They are then on a par with the majority of 
their group ; consequently there is no further 
incentive or drive to improvement. The 

1 For a summary of these and related results, see Thorndike, 
Educational Psychology, Vol. 2. 



96 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

same thing occurs in typewriting and in 
practically all of the vocations. The great 
mass of individuals takes the lowest level of 
adjustment which will enable it to earn a 
living; and then the environment ceases to 
offer any adequate incentive for the continua- 
tion of practice. How can we get a learner 
away from this low level ? This is the cry of 
the business world to-day. It is the cry of 
the schoolroom as well. It has been shown 
in these experiments that if high stimulating 
values can be obtained, the learning curve will 
again immediately begin to rise. Curves of 
animal learning, where the incentive is kept 
high by controlling the food and other factors, 
show no plateaux. We might illustrate how 
the addition of an incentive will produce im- 
provement by a hypothetical example in the 
field of typewriting. As soon as an individual 
can just take care of an ofiice adequately, say 
at fifteen dollars per week, there comes a 
slump in the learning. Now suppose that a 
larger ofiice is willing to try out this individ- 
ual's services. ' She goes there and finds that 
her work is not so rapid nor so accurate as 
that of certain other girls in the oflfice. The 
record of these better-paid girls serves as a 
stimulus or drive. Our individual then gets 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 97 

an added incentive and soon reaches a higher 
level. Another period of non-improvement 
results, and not until some other incentive is 
added will she improve. Suppose literature 
has been put in her hands which shows that 
the touch system of typewriting is more effi- 
cient than the method she has been using. 
Another impetus has been given to her work, 
a better method is employed, and improve- 
ment again results. Suppose now a prize is 
offered for speed and she enters the contest. 
Under the emotional excitement improvement 
will again show up. Finally, world records 
begin to serve as a stimulus for improvement ; 
and we at last find our individual holding the 
world's record for speed. 

The business world has to a certain extent 
studied methods by which it can get this 
added drive. The system of profit sharing so 
largely utilized by Ford and other manufac- 
turers, the offering of bonuses or dividends, 
extra pay, etc., introduces emotional factors 
which almost immediately bring the workers up 
to much more efficient levels. Unfortunately 
the schoolroom has neglected this important 
element. A while ago I referred to the fact 
that emotional reactions put the organism into 
such a changed physiological condition that it 



98 PRACTICAL, THEORETICAL PROBLEMS 

can do things which it could not do at other 
times. Consequently if we could only get 
some way of arousing emotion at critical 
places in learning we would have the solution 
of our problem. I believe that this can be 
accomplished to some extent in the school- 
room by the selection of teachers who have 
that very definite gift of attaching to them- 
selves the emotional life of the pupils. Such 
teachers can and undoubtedly do get the 
added drive which comes from emotional 
arousal. You may say that this has been 
generally recognized in practice. Possibly 
it has, but the reason for it has not been under- 
stood and we have not insisted upon it as a 
sine qua non. Our test of the teacher is his 
erudition which may or may not go along with 
the ability to fix and to hold the love of the 
child. For this reason I should never put the 
untried and inexperienced teacher in to teach 
the youngest children, which is now so often 
done. If the teachers are chosen with care, 
such emotional attachments as I now defend 
are easily controlled and no evil consequences 
need result. We have begun here, though, 
to deal in dreams of the future and with 
speculations, and the experimenter has a long 
way to go before he can offer information 



IN INSTINCT AND HABIT 99 

which will be anything more than vaguely 
suggestive. 

May I sum up in a few words the general 
drift of my argument ? It is this : the be- 
havior laboratories are working daily at 
problems which lie close to our school systems. 
Would it not be to the advantage both of the 
laboratories and of the schools to stay some- 
what in touch with each other; cannot the 
schools of our land be kept flexible in all 
matters and ready to try out at least the most 
promising data which come from the labora- 
tories ? 



MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 
CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 



BY 

ADOLF MEYER, M.D. 

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 



MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 
CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 

Great emergencies create great efforts and 
bring out great minds. Chicago with its 
tremendous problems of amalgamation and in- 
tegration of a huge foreign population, with 
its complex political and civic machinery, 
its widely varied neighborhood problems, and 
with its tremendous tasks of education, has 
brought to the front its. Colonel Parker, its 
John Dewey, its Mrs. Ella Flagg Young; it 
has given the occasion for such magnanimous 
creations and developments as the Francis 
Parker School, the University School, and 
that noteworthy institution which aims to go 
to the root of sad mishaps in the child and in 
the adolescent, — the institution so generously 
and wisely made possible by those who gave 
the opportunities of work to Dr. Healy. 

A school system and such affiliated organi- 
zations as Chicago has developed strongly 
draw one to come and learn, and to meet 
with those vitally interested, even if the 
occasion demands that he in turn contribute 

• 103 



104 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH JN- A 

to the discussion. There is clearly a very i 
potent personal stimulus of my interest in 
schools in the fact that in all my work I aml^ 
constantly confronted with the question : '^ 
What has been the share of nature and of . 
nurture, and of home and school, in the lives ' 
of the patients who form the subject of my 
medical work? My great desire to"*-iearn 
more through closer contact from the many 
workers whose life interest lies in the shap- 
ing of the school problem and my interest in 
a prospective experiment with a school as 
a community center account for my yielding 
readily to Mrs. Dummer's appeal to under- 
take a humble discussion of what the psy- 
chopathologist might have to contribute to 
a constructive consideration of the relation 
of the school to mental and moral health. 

There are periods when some of our human 
institutions are blindly accepted by tradition as 
if they were the revelation of immutable truths; 
and other periods come when there is debate 
and a conviction of possibilities of growth. 

To be sure, every human institution such as 
a school system has to have its frame of stable 
and dependable organization if it is to hold 
its own among the many other factors mak- 
ing up organized civilization. But, as it 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 105 

serves as one of the organs of the growing and 
ever-changing world of mankind, the frame 
and the structure as a whole will always have 
to be more than dead bone, a living, adaptable 
part of the great biological and sociological 
integrations of human beings into organized 
communities. And success will always be 
judged by the great criterion of the mental 
and moral health of its products. 

To study the school as an organ of the 
community and to study its possible share in 
the attainment of mental and moral health, 
is no small contract. Such a program sug- 
gests problems which I certainly do not pre- 
tend to solve in an hour's talk. I must 
limit myself to discussing what changes and 
what growth have occurred in my own field, 
— that of the study of mind and of mental 
health problems, — matters that might well 
be of interest to those who have the fate and 
shaping of a school policy in their hands. 
As such changes I would mention : 
1. The reaching out of psychiatry from 
hospital administration to the study of the 
individual patient, wherever found ; — and 
the gain in the relation of individual and 
community and their respective share of 
responsibility for mental and moral health. 



106 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

2. A firmer recognition of the intrinsic 
unity of the problem of all health, that of 
special organs and also that of the entire 
individual. 

3. The development of methods to get 
useful inventories of the assets and deter- 
mining factors of the lives of pupils and their 
problems, and a correspondingly better prac- 
tical grasp on their management. 

4. The advantage accruing from such study 
as regards the prevention and correction of 
mental sickness, and the gain, also, of general 
efficiency and a vision of natural lines of growth 
and progress through and in the schools. 

THE BROADENING OF PSYCHIATRY 

I feel strongly that the educator and the 
physician have more and more common 
ground on account of the great progress made 
both in the school and in the medical spheres. 
Since the days when I took my first plunge 
into practical adult life in Chicago and 
Kankakee, momentous transformations have 
occurred in the lifework that I then chose. 
From having their main and almost exclusive 
field in hospitals largely for committed pa- 
tients, such as that of Kankakee, the psy- 
chiatric interests have broadened until one 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 107 

of our most inspiring activities is now 
extra-institutional work in the community 
and especially at the point where the individ- 
ual first enters community life — the school. 
Witness only the work of your Society for 
Mental Hygiene and of various dispensaries, 
and the growing amount of work done for 
child welfare. 

In the last twenty years, a transformation 
has also taken place in the very mode of ap- 
proach of the psychiatrist and psychopa- 
thologist to his immediate task. I have often 
told of a little experience I had at Kankakee : 
At the autopsy of a patient who had dropped 
dead after a hearty meal, I had shown the 
jury that the man had succumbed to the 
rupture of his diseased heart muscle. The 
foreman of the jury, a physician, satisfied 
with the demonstration of the cause of death, 
watched me examine the brain and finally 
asked: "Now, Doctor, show us what you 
find in the mind." I feel sure that he thought 
that our knowledge of the brain would give 
us the safest knowledge of the patient's mental 
state. I had to refer him for the mental find- 
ings to the history or life-record of the case, 
which in those days was very meager, partly 
owing to the small number of physicians in 



108 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

proportion to the number of patients, and 
partly because the physicians had no con- 
fidence in the hfe-record as a scientific fact. 
Notwithstanding the growth of our knowl- 
edge of brains, we have since learned more 
than ever to express the facts of mind much 
more definitely in accounts of the personality, 
and much more in terms of actual life than 
in fanciful descriptions of brains in terms of 
what I call neurologizing tautologies. Psy- 
chology has learned to make the biography 
its very frame and starting point, the record 
of the connected and coherent activity of the 
individual and the study of the essential parts 
of the life-record and its determining factors, 
i.e., the things and experiences that play a 
r61e in shaping the life. Psychology is not 
merely an ultra-erudite and bone-dry labora- 
tory interest or a kind of grab-bag of myste- 
rious forces and tricks beginning with the sub- 
conscious and hypnotism, but as Dr. Watson 
so ably illustrated from his own work-shop, 
a study of actual observable processes cover- 
ing the whole range of the individual's ac- 
tivity from sleeping to the fullest waking 
behavior, such as these processes of learning 
and acquiring and using experiences — func- 
tions with a clearly biological foundation. 



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CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 109 
THE LIFE-CHART 

To-day we study mental activity and be- 
havior, i.e., the topic of psychology, as the 
function and activity of the unified organism, 
just as we view physiology as the science 
studying the behavior and function of the 
various organs and parts. The study of the 
total behavior of the individual and its integra- 
tion as it hangs together as part of a life-history 
of a personality in distinction from the life- 
history of a single organ, that is our great 
interest in psychology and psychopathology. 
No words of mine can give you a more graphic 
picture of the concreteness of what counts than 
the life-chart — a record, on the one hand, of 
the condition and of the performance of the 
various bodily functions and special organs, 
and of the role each of these plays in shaping 
the biography or life of the person ; and, on 
the other hand, the various experiences ex- 
pressing the lines of habit-and-resource for- 
mation constituting the accumulated mass of 
habits, memories, and the reactive resources 
of the individual. The result of this integra- 
tion is not an abstract mind but a living body 
in action, a unified personality, an individual 
with capacity for reflexes and instincts and 



110 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

habits and memories and imaginative reactive 
resources. 

A life can be presented graphically as a 
record of the special organs (arbitrarily repre- 
sented in the form of a weight curve of the 
principal parts), and at the same time as a 
record of total behavior. The interrelation 
of the parts and the whole, as I said, consti- 
tutes a system of integration. The plan 
depicts clearly the welding of the parts into 
an organism, and the interrelation of the or- 
ganism as a whole with the events and the facts 
of the outside world, in the form of reac- 
tions of the personality or individual, consti- 
tuting the sum total of the life-history of the 
parts or special functions as well as of the 
whole. Thus we can appreciate the fact that 
the respiration has to serve properly the total 
need of oxygen and the elimination of car- 
bon dioxid, but the same combination also 
has to serve the functions of voice and lan- 
guage production as integrated by the nervous 
system ; and this has to blend with even the 
larger needs and aims of the total organism, 
since most of our thought is couched in lan- 
guage, forming an important part of those habits 
and trends which we specify as "the mental 
and moral life" and its resources. Thus we 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 111 

see in thought and speech an integration of 
an organ simultaneously serving simple phys- 
iological demands and also serving such a 
function as the one I am at present en- 
gaged in, in a full-fledged observable mental 
activity. 

The great advantage of this simplification, 
of viewing Tnind primarily as the adaptive and 
creative activity of a biological organism in terms 
of a biography and record, is that it gives us a 
practical way of putting forth our facts and 
problems — whether we try to educate a 
person or whether we apply mental ortho- 
pedics to the correction of behavior, whether 
it be in connection with any special organ or 
any special function, or activities involving 
the whole personality. Moreover, it gives us 
a valuable sense of proportion between what 
counts in the life and what is purely inciden- 
tal ; the overt and demonstrable life brought 
out by overt action and expression, and the 
mere thoughts ; the performance rather than 
the mere knowledge, the result rather than the 
mere step to it. 

THE BIOLOGICAL CONCEPTION OF MAN 

Besides the practical emphasis, the sim- 
plified scheme shows us human life with its 



112 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

material and spiritual aspects as a consistent 
whole. We are no longer worried and con- 
fused by the apparent chasm between nature 
and the world of human life and its ambi- 
tions, which seems to have staggered even 
Huxley so that it drove him into the transi- 
tory phase of agnosticism and doubt as to the 
possibility of harmonizing the laws of nature 
and of life with the great human world of am- 
bitions and of dreams of perfection and ideals, 
the laws of the mores, or ethics, and religion. 
As we said before, a complex and yet simple 
organization of natural and creative forces 
into actual living individuals is what we have 
to deal with — an organization starting from 
lowly origins but reaching as high as its sup- 
port will carry ; the product of a long process 
of growth and function, an unfolding of in- 
stincts and their application and transforma- 
tion, a readiness for and attraction to many 
experiences and performances, an evolution 
through a wealth of reactions and capacities 
gradually wrought into habits and resources, 
rising to full-fledged individual and social life 
with its heights of appreciative and creative 
attainment. There is but one way to learn to 
know such an organism and that is through 
its life-history, the record of past and present 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 113 

reactions, from which we can foretell the 
range of capacities of the future. 

LANGUAGE AS A GREAT STEP OF PROGRESS AND 
SOURCE OF SERIOUS EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

In comparing the simpler biological organ- 
isms and man in respect to growth and educa- 
tion, we are at once struck by a contrast which 
is very significant and which entails the great 
preeminence of man in the scale of evolution 
but also a great risk in the sphere of health. 
The development of language and its symbols, 
the development of the silent language, and 
language memory, and imagination in terms 
of language, gives man at once the great priv- 
ilege and the great task of maintaining the 
proper balance, so much more difficult than 
where life consists more conspicuously of 
overt and direct activity, as in animals. 

The ability to store knowledge in terms of 
word-memories and principles, in terms of 
written and transmitted doctrine, creates the 
human atmosphere and brings with it the 
temptation to change the system of educa- 
tion from that of training to one of teaching 
and instructing. So great is this temptation 
that the traditional scheme of education has 
limited itself almost exclusively to this one 
I 



• 



114 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

type of human attainment, and indeed there 
are many who would not Hke to see the 
school do anything else; and all this in the 
face of the fact that our very nature is a prod- 
uct of the growth and nurture of an organ- 
ism in which impulse, instinct and differential 
activity and performance make up what 
counts in the biography or life-record. Ac- 
tivity is the natural setting and very nature 
of all mental growth. As has been said, 
*'The laws of mental health and of character 
require the completion of thought or feeling 
by expression in action." Mere feeling and 
thought and fancy which are not brought to 
the test of action, to their fulfilment in action, 
tend to become one of the danger points of 
human nature.^ 

Even in the prebiological period of human 
thought as among the Greeks, the school 
aimed at the development of the entire or- 
ganism and the development of all-round 
fitness for adult life. Later the medieval 
tendency to treat an abstract mind as an 
entity by itself, and the sectarian tendency 
to keep important aspects of life out of the 
curriculum, tended to focus attention upon 
but one feature of the personality. When we 
look at biographies, the schooling clearly 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 115 

gives the main setting to a long series of years. 
Even if the ideal of the scheme of education 
aimed mainly at knowledge and at the ac- 
quisition of the arts of reading and writing 
and arithmetic and a certain amount of his- 
torical, linguistic and natural history informa- 
tion, the period of school-life is the time 
during which the habits acquired in earlier 
childhood become more definitely shaped. Be- 
tween home, social environment and school, 
the young citizen spends six, eight and more 
years to attain the ideal of education of his 
or her generation. The traditional school 
aims at conveying systematized knowledge, 
the results of centuries of human evolution, — 
the paper money of experience, a set of capaci- 
ties which a democracy must be able to expect 
of its citizens, and which life at large would 
supply only very unsystematically. For this 
purpose the school practically takes possession 
of the child and the adolescent, and it deter- 
mines the principal features of that period of 
life. Need we wonder that it is more and 
more concerning itself with a broader concep- 
tion of education than that of mere ''mental 
training"? 



116 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

THE MODERN TESTS OF A SCHOOL SYSTEM 

The questions we might ask about a school 
system are : Can the result be called well 
rounded, making for preparedness for an effi- 
cient and wholesome thirty or forty or more 
years of adult life ? Does the product of such 
training know what he or she is fit for ; what 
he or she wants and will try to do as his or her 
share of the work of sustenance and produc- 
tiveness? Is the school training in harmony 
with our best knowledge of the integrated 
human organism and personality : Does it 
satisfy the principle that life ultimately be 
judged in terms of a biography of objective 
achievement and that knowledge is merely 
an incidental asset and telling only when it 
shows in effective or expressive activity? 
Does it succeed in forging the natural assets 
into power ? And finally, what share can any 
type of school have in favoring or damaging 
the individual chances for mental and moral 
health and efficiency ? 

Paton, in his Psychiatry (pp. 198-199), 
attributes "the enormous increase of nervous 
and mental diseases, one of the most serious 
menaces to the public welfare," to the at- 
tempt to educate numbers of individuals 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 117 

whose central nervous systems are func- 
tionally unable to withstand the strain im- 
posed upon them. He would limit the ad- 
vantages and risks of education in the public 
schools to those who have sound bodies and 
sound minds. "To render it possible for 
an individual who is physically and mentally 
unfit for the stress associated with the effort 
to undertake the acquirement of what is 
termed a liberal education should be regarded 
as an offense against the public health and 
morality no less culpable than if one were to 
deliberately place him in an environment 
where he is exposed to an infectious disease. 
What particular form of education is best 
adapted to the average child .^^ How far 
should the negro be carried in his schooling .^^ 
Of what degree of mental activity is woman 
capable without impairing her physical vigor ? 
These are not questions that can be solved 
by mere amateurs, but involve problems call- 
ing for the earnest consideration of those who 
are at least familiar with the methods of inves- 
tigating the difficulties connected with the 
functional activity of the central nervous 
system." 

Here are questions which we may not 
expect to answer to-night, unless we should 



118 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

care to risk becoming classified with the 
amateurs. But they open our eyes to the 
necessity of studying the problem as far as 
facts are available and to some ways of using 
especially what methods we have acquired 
through the biological conception of man. 

STUDIES IN MENTAL HYGIENE 

There are two ways of being interested in 
health ; the common one is that of making 
a list and plan of all the things that are good 
and desirable in life and giving the best 
possible description of utopia and of perfec- 
tion with recommendations as to how to get 
there. The way of the worker in modern 
hygiene is that of making a survey of the 
actual activities and conditions, and then of 
taking up definite points of difiiculty, tracing 
them to an understanding in terms of causes 
and effects and to factors on which fruitful 
experimental analytical and constructive work 
can be done. The first type leads mainly to 
moralizing ; the second type leads to conscien- 
tious and impartial study and to construc- 
tive experimentation. It is one thing to 
study the problem of mental and moral health 
in the abstract and another to take up the 
definite points at which the human being is 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 119 

apt to fail and to trace them specifically to 
factors which can receive consideration in 
experimental creative work and in a construc- 
tive school program. 

To get help from the field of the abnormal- 
ities and difiiculties of children and of methods 
of teaching, naturally requires familiarity 
with the well-studied overt major and minor 
mental disorders and the methods of getting 
at their understanding — and also with the 
aims and methods of pedagogy. These are 
quite obviously matters which can be acquired 
only by practical work and collaboration in 
the fields concerned. What I can survey here 
is merely a sketch of some fundamental facts 
and principles to show possibilities and 
methods as a basis for recommendations of 
organization. 

THE PSYCHOBIOLOGICAL VIEW OF PROBLEMS 
MET IN SCHOOL 

Let me state as the first requirement that 
the school-physician should have a clear con- 
ception of the school child's nature as an or- 
ganism to be studied in its parts and also as a 
psychobiological whole, a personality and 
individual — a conception which implies train- 
ing in psychobiology for at least a certain 



120 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

number of the school physicians. The school 
physician who has the analytic-constructive 
biological conception approaches the pupil 
with due attention to disorders of eye and ear, 
of the breathing and the possible adenoids, 
and the state of nutrition ; but he also knows 
that the pupil brings to the school an endow- 
ment not merely of special organs but also 
of habits of total-function ; good or bad food- 
habits expressing themselves in appetites and 
more or less orderly habits of feeding and of 
digestion ; a more or less adequate equip- 
ment of habits of sleep and waking and 
resting and activity ; the kind of life charac- 
teristic of the infant or child or adolescent, 
different from that of the adult or old person ; 
he recognizes individual differences in the 
scope of endowment and resources ; endurance 
and concentration and interest ; or weak- 
ness, distractability and indifference ; a vary- 
ing ability to control with foresight the mo- 
mentary notions, temptations and desires ; a 
capacity of contentment and satisfaction, or 
of unrest; habits of self-dependence or of 
dependence upon others and craving for at- 
tention ; habits for team work or a lack of 
social instincts ; an ability to mix, to respond 
to others and to make them respond — an 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 121 

ability to understand and to be understood 
and to enjoy and be enjoyed. Within this 
large sphere of resources and activities and 
qualifications we may further single out 
features such as varying preparedness to 
meet the unusual or perhaps the undesirable, 
such as sickness, and varying amenability 
to discipline and to guidance, and capacities 
to assume responsibilities and duties. Here 
there is a mass of vital facts requiring con- 
sideration if the child is to be put into the 
best balanced situations. Dr. Watson has 
singled out from the greatly varied life of the 
infant the emotions of rage and fear and love 
and joy; and a similar sifting will have to 
be done, with similar care, for the instinctive 
factors and the lines of acquisition of training 
of the older child so that we may get a natural 
picture of the inheritable dispositions and the 
lines in which they can be brought out and 
shaped or, as the Latin word has it, educated, 
and studied as fundamental units. 

Until we shall have our nursery and child- 
hood laboratories, might we not be guided 
in a helpful manner by the grave school of 
life, with its exhibits of the blundering of 
human nature ? 



122 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

HELPS FROM MEDICAL EXPERIENCE 

Nine years ago I formulated my experience 
in a paper on *'What do histories of cases of 
insanity teach us concerning preventive mental 
hygiene during the years of school-life ?" (pub- 
lished in Vol. II of the Psychological Clinic). 
I shall not attempt to restate my facts and 
conclusions as fully to-day as I did then, but 
shall choose a few cases from a somewhat dif- 
ferent angle, so as to reinforce our conception 
of man and also so as to throw some light on 
how to proceed in the study of the simpler but 
often equally difficult problems you meet in 
schools. 

An attempt to find in the literature discus- 
sions of common difficulties of pupils in schools 
— the kind of thing that one would expect 
teachers to try to find help for — left me with 
a remarkably small return. Apart from the 
Paedagogische Pathologic oder die Lehre von 
den Fehlern (faults) der Kinder by Prof. 
Ludwig Strlimpell (Leipzig — 1892), I know 
of no systematic presentation even in the 
recent works on the hygiene of the child's 
mind, of the very problems which the teacher 
would seem to me to meet almost daily in 
his or her efforts to attain mental and moral 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 123 

health in the children. The most noteworthy 
specific beginning comes from your own midst, 
in Dr. Healy's recent book on Honesty, which 
naturally deals with but a limited though 
widely pervading topic. 

I have no doubt that there is in a way a 
healthy feature to this abstinence from ex- 
cessive discussion. Most of the efforts at 
remedy are properly made in the very biolog- 
ical foundations: in better feeding, better 
rest and the creation of more contentment 
on the part of the pupils. These efforts are 
clearly the basic substitute for the effete 
and long-winded discussions of a merely moral- 
izing type. But there certainly are condi- 
tions in which the fundamental helps of food, 
rest and contentment are insufficient, and 
where nothing but a thorough personality 
study will reveal the causes at work. The 
problems of shyness and fear of recitation and 
other fears, of carelessness, absentmindedness, 
of unexpected slumps of performance, of 
obstinacy and unruliness, of lying, etc. are 
issues which may call for as careful a study and 
understanding as those clearly morbid condi- 
tions which even to-day are brought to the 
physician, because they attract the attention 
of the family as well as that of the teacher. 



124 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

I take the liberty of mentioning a few cases 
of disorders of this period of life, as we could 
not take up a full discussion of specially diffi- 
cult temperaments and specially difficult situ- 
ations without getting too technical for a 
brief lecture. We can only pick out a few 
samples which may broaden our horizon, 
although they did not come up primarily as 
school problems. 

A little girl of 8 comes to us with nervous restless- 
ness and a twitching of the face which she is said to have 
acquired two years ago from wet applications used during 
an attack of tonsilhtis. She leads her class, memorizes 
poetry for pleasure, must be the first in everything ; is 
restless and fidgety. She has slightly enlarged tonsils 
and perhaps a slightly enlarged thyroid. In the Binet 
scale she ranks one year above normal, especially in the 
points in which she has been drilled at school, but lower 
where she had to depend on her own wits and her own 
imagination. 

Now what conditions does she live in.f' What is her 
mental background ? She is afraid to sleep alone. She 
sleeps in her mother's bed, with the father in the same 
room ; she talks in her sleep, is restless, and the mother 
wakes her once a night to avoid bed-wetting, although 
this has not occurred for a year. The child has her own 
way about food and everything. She knows how to 
keep her mother on the rack by telling her of what horri- 
ble things the girls talk about at school. The girl asks 
the mother questions and is told not to ask her again 
about such matters ; and back she goes to where her 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 125 

curiosity is satisfied. You can judge where her fancy 
turns from the fact that the patient, who is anxious for 
a baby brother, was rather dehghted when her mother 
had a headache, as that made her suspect a pregnancy. 

Whose tonsils shall we have removed in that family? 
Almost every point mentioned calls for a modification of 
the way of living and instruction under the guidance of a 
trained social worker, and we may be sure that the girl 
can be saved from many and graver dangers than the 
bad effects from her tonsils. 

Another girl of 6 is brought to the dispensary because, 
since her mother's death three years ago, and especially 
since her father died, one and a half years ago, she is 
nervous, stands up in bed, screams, grabs her grand- 
mother with whom she sleeps, is scared, bites her nails, 
does not play; she is bashful and timid, hides behind 
the grandmother, but can be interested at once when 
candy is mentioned ; she is curious and rather character- 
istically so, tears up the toys to see their insides ; most 
of her talk is about her father and mother, with such 
questions as whether her father gets anything to eat. 
She does not go out because she has so often been told 
that she is "the only grandchild." The little patient 
buys candy incessantly. The nightmares are helped by 
bromide ; but a simple readjustment of the conditions 
of life with reasonable emancipation from the grand- 
mother has helped her much more generally. The 
grandmother states that she is like another child, so 
much less nervous and so much more reasonable. 

Let us take an instance from the much larger group 
where all trouble was tided over until the period of 
puberty brought a new strain. A boy of 15^ years is 
brought with choreiform movements of his right arm 



126 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

and fingers, headache and loss of appetite. The mater- 
nal grandmother was nervous; the mother is nervous 
and has been mentally deranged in connection with two 
of her childbirths. The father too had a nervous 
breakdown "due to overwork." 

The boy had cried much during the first months of 
his life. He went to Kindergarten at 4, and entered 
High School at 12 and now is described as too fond of 
study for his strength. He is called a "night hawk"; 
laughed at by his sisters, etc. 

After a slight burn in 1908 choreiform twitches of the 
right arm had developed with jerky movements and 
some numbness of the hand lasting about six months. 
Lately the nights have become restless and, during a 
writing test, the hand began to jerk again. He began 
to feel the lack of air in school, felt as if he should vomit 
unless he got out; once he ran away from home. His 
father suspected self -abuse and as we learned ourselves, 
justly so ; but not knowing how to get near the boy, he 
charged him in the presence of the family with playing 
with himself, which only aggravated the boy's discom- 
fiture. To teach the boy to understand himself and the 
parents to understand him, was the main problem of 
treatment, and after a hygienic summer, the boy re- 
sumed his normal standing in school. 

THE NEED OF STUDYING THE INDIVIDUAL CASE 

The reason why I should like to give you 
also a bird's-eye view of the varied troubles 
of the adult as well is this: there is a wide- 
spread notion current among the public, 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM m 

and possibly also in the medical profession, 
that what you have to do in these disorders 
is to get a formal diagnosis as the result of 
some more or less specific and remarkable 
test or trick, and that this diagnosis is then 
used to prescribe a very particular treat- 
ment. If you mean by diagnosis a knowl- 
edge and understanding of what the moving 
forces are and how they work and how they 
can be modified, you are on safe ground; if, 
however, you think you have gained much 
when you have found a name for the condi- 
tion, you deceive yourselves. If I may turn 
once more to the life chart which I brought 
with me, you find there in brief a record of 
a patient who was driven into invalidism 
through many misunderstandings. Call the 
condition neurasthenia or hysteria; the fact 
is that you only describe and classify it dog- 
matically that way. In order to understand 
it, you have to trace the various factors, and 
you find from the age of five a habit of head- 
aches, a dependence on others, lack of emanci- 
pation, the tendency to appeal for sympathy 
by her complaints; then after her marriage 
and the birth of a child and subsequent inter- 
ference with her normal instinctive life, fear 
of losing the affection of her husband, more 



ns MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

invalidism; then several unfortunate and 
mutilating operations, a real evisceration in- 
stead of a study of the facts in the case, but 
finally a readjustment under a treatment re- 
establishing better habits, a better under- 
standing of the difficulties and an end of mak- 
ing the stomach and the head the scapegoat 
of failure of adaptation. In this case, as in 
many similar ones, the school missed an 
opportunity to trace the situation which 
tolerated and possibly encouraged the persist- 
ence of the habit-headache, the reasons for 
dependence and lack of emancipation, etc. 

THE PROBLEMS OF PHYSICIAN AND TEACHER 
THE PROBLEMS OF ALL LIFE 

Does this recital of concrete medical ex- 
perience suggest to you the close similarity 
of the problems of the physician and those 
of the teacher, those of all life? What you 
see in this brief sketch of our adult patient is 
what we must learn to determine even in 
the minor disturbances and especially also 
in the disciplinary difficulties of the child ; 
we must not be satisfied with mere descrip- 
tions and with distress over the regrettable 
difficulties and with off-hand efforts to apply 
traditional measures of correction which may 
not fit the case or may only smooth over the 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 129 

trouble. But we must devise methods of 
getting at the facts in a judicious, helpful 
and constructive manner, and that means 
the systematic use of what we physicians 
and you teachers alike have learnt to rec- 
ognize as obligatory — a study of the individ- 
ual case in the light of his or her development 
and home and school situation. 

Where nervous and behavior disorders 
are corrected by attention to special organs 
as in eye strain, or adenoids, it is of the 
utmost importance not to neglect, in an 
optimistic mood, the weak spot in the psy- 
chobiological balance which may show again 
under some other strain or which may persist 
as evidence of deficit or of sources of irrita- 
tion. 

SCHOOL PROBLEMS 

There are problems of the management of 
life in and out of school and there are ways of 
getting at the facts and of adjusting them. 
The school undoubtedly has its share in pro- 
ducing or favoring the disorders of balance 
at the bottom of the smaller and greater 
failures of adaptation. It is my impression, 
however, that the modern school is open in 
the main to fewer charges of commission than 






130 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

to charges of omission. Most abnormali- 
ties undoubtedly have their foundation laid 
in the home, by heredity, and by a poor 
start in habit-formation. In the European 
schools there is much concern about the 
tjberburdung, the overtaxing of the school 
child, a problem which might be considered 
an exception here, except when a child does 
not know how to work and how to play. 
The school is more apt to furnish a more or 
less innocent aggravation of more deeply 
rooted difficulties, traits which come to the 
front as much or even more in the extra- 
scholastic life of the youngster. A more spe- 
cific school problem is the frequent recurrence 
of weariness and ennui, with puzzling and 
meandering in thought mazes. With this 
goes a tendency to develop false standards, 
habits of putting up a sham front of perform- 
ance where the pupil is hardly doing more 
than serving time; a formal obedience and 
formal attention without any real interest 
and performance. This actual training in 
the intellectual dishonesty of maintaining 
appearance of interest and work where the 
interest is plainly wandering, inevitably warps 
the development of the fundamental instincts 
of action and its appreciation and incentives. 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 131 

It stunts the appetites and capacities the 
child actually has, and it creates pockets for 
dangerous ruminations, fancies and day- 
dreams which are not apt to be drawn out 
into the world of activity, test and correc- 
tion — the very things that stand out all 
over the cases I have cited. Even among the 
best we have to face a pitfall that comes 
from man's unique development of mere 
language and thought habits favoring a diffi- 
culty of balance of thought and fancy on the 
one hand and the capacity and output of 
performance on the other. 

It is a striking fact that in the main the 
more serious and conspicuous disorders are 
much less frequent and less glaring in children 
than in the adult. But we see all the more 
clearly the possible roots from which the 
smaller and the graver disorders arise. The 
most frequent disorders, if we disregard for 
the time the defective growth of the nervous 
system and the infectious and toxic affec- 
tions of the nervous system associated with 
feeblemindedness, epilepsy and kindred de- 
fects or retardation of development, are due to 
defect of balancing resources, unevenness of 
endowment and of assets, often with tenden- 
cies to overreach — with deficit and disap- 



132 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

pointment reactions — or briefly put, the big 
problem is that of poorly balanced yearning 
and desires. The greatest problem is not that 
of feeblemindedness. There are plenty of good 
and well-behaved imbeciles. The point that 
concerns us all is that back of everything lie 
the yearnings, the ''penchant," the leanings 
of the individual's make-up and the equation 
of balancing factors of the individual and the 
social group — the capacity to balance the 
resources wherever there is a choice or a need 
of proper adaptation and substitutions. 

Disease shows us along what lines human 
beings are apt to break down and what man 
is not made for. It points inexorably to any 
existing discrepancies of balance, and errors 
in the working out of one's economic safety 
and efficiency. Some diseases are a com- 
munity disgrace, others a social disgrace, still 
others must be charged to the stock (poorly 
guided habits of mating) and to the life of the 
family, and still others to the individual. 
Most diseases are chargeable to the unwill- 
ingness or inability to face realities of makeup 
and situation and to shape one's life in keep- 
ing with them. And the same holds for the 
major and the minor difficulties one meets 
in the schoolroom and playroom; the shy- 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 133 

ness, the fears, misbehavior, temporary inef- 
ficiency, etc. 

It is here, in the apparently trifling signals 
of something being wrong, that the psycho- 
pathologist may be able to offer his share of 
help in the form of methods developed in 
the study of mental disease. Thereby he 
serves two purposes : viz., that of helping 
the pupil, possibly for a lifetime, by aiding 
him or her to assure harmony between means 
and ends, and, second, that of fostering in- 
spiration for a broader view of the teachers' 
working sphere. 

But why all this interest in the abnormal ? 
The main problem of the teacher is the healthy 
child. My contention is that a natural in- 
terest in all things human helps us to a more 
broadly biological and more broadly human 
and unified understanding of facts and 
methods. 

THE GAIN FROM THE STUDY OF INDIVIDUALS 

In the examples of problems of mental 
health just discussed and even in the serious 
and full-fledged mental disorders, we have, 
I hope, made it clear how much more sys- 
tematically we have learned to inquire into 
the very human facts of the patients' biog- 



134 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

raphies. A thorough search into antece- 
dents, into the temporary situation and into 
the prospects, i.e. into the facts constituting 
the human biography, proves to be the only 
rational way to deal with most of the diffi- 
culties of mind during the school age or any 
other period, and that not in the sense of a 
**faute de mieux," an acceptance of common- 
sense psychobiology "because we do not 
know enough about the brain" and the like, 
but in the sense of its being the most depend- 
able and constructively most helpful proce- 
dure, considering the actual mode of working 
and function and evolution of the brain and 
of the entire individual, the personality. 

Even hasty consideration imperatively sug- 
gests the desirability of the study of pedagog- 
ical difficulties by a properly trained psy- 
chopathologist who cooperates with the 
teacher and who is in a position to review the 
assets and the situation of the child under 
consideration in and out of school, and es- 
pecially with due attention to the full life- 
history. 

PRACTICAL APPLICATION 

The plan that suggests itself is that a school 
physician with training in psychopathology 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 135 

attend regular conferences at which the man- 
agement of the problematic pupils is brought 
up and discussed. The instances calling for 
special study might then be taken up under 
the direction of the physician, perhaps by a 
teacher or in part by a school nurse, but pref- 
erably by a teacher detailed for part of her 
time to make a study of the home situation 
and of all those facts which the physician 
needs if he is to make a thorough study of the 
individual. It should be a specific part of the 
work of teachers aspiring to promotion to do 
a certain amount of extrascholastic or field 
work on specific children and to collect the 
facts and to establish the relationships be- 
tween school and home which give that maxi- 
mum help that should come from the school 
to individual and community. The teachers 
to whom such tasks are to be assigned should 
work under the guidance of and in close 
cooperation with the psychiatrically trained 
school physician, so that they may learn to 
prepare a most useful life-record. Such a 
document, I am sure, can readily be made a 
record of the fundamental assets and traits 
and needs of each child and of fairly specific 
home problems, supplemented by the record 
of the assets brought out by a thorough per- 



136 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

sonal examination by a competent physi- 
cian, who may be assisted by a psychometrist 
where the physician favors such a division of 
labor. Dr. Watson's research into funda- 
mental factors would thus receive a splendid 
supplement by the continual search for de- 
termining factors and individual tendencies 
of children and for more or less typically 
recurring home and school situations calling 
for special study. 

HELP IN FINDING ONe's BEST PLACE 

This kind of individual study lays the foun- 
dations for probably the greatest function of 
a public school. There is no doubt about the 
school's great opportunity and responsibility 
to help the child and parents find the best 
level and direction of ambition adapted to 
the individual endowment. The school has 
to accept the children as they are. We may 
supervise to some extent our children's choice 
of companions in the neighborhood ; but the 
school must take the children who come prac- 
tically without choice. What it can and must 
do, however, is to grade and group them so as 
to give them an opportunity to develop their 
many different personalities so as to be true to 
themselves and also to the wider world. It 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 137 

can single out extremes at bottom and at 
top of the scale, and it may make special pro- 
visions for individual treatment of different 
types of working habits, temperament and 
general behavior. But it must refrain from 
making the classes too set and rigid, and also 
from creating false standards of competition. 

It is easy to see how the physician's stand- 
point blends with the standpoint of those 
representing educational and vocational in- 
terests in a union of the two fundamental 
methods of pedagogical psychology : the -^ 
test-method and the method of study of the 
life-history with the analysis. 

Binet, interested in the grading of the pupils 
of the Paris schools, was the first to develop a 
systematic set of tests serving the purpose 
of standardizing. So much is written on 
these tests that I take a knowledge of the scope 
of this movement for granted. Most of us use 
the method as one of the most practical helps 
that has come to us from psychology. To- 
gether with other tests, we need as an obliga- 
tory help the method specially emphasized 
in this paper, the life-history furnishing an 
analysis of the determining factors and special 
individual tendencies. With these founda- 
tions the record of a child must furnish a 



138 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

most valuable and indispensable means by 
which the teacher can get an idea of the indi- 
vidual needs and capacities. The art of the 
teacher has to create a development of types 
of instruction that will bring satisfaction in 
activity through using the special individual 
type of yearnings, and, to do that, we need a 
record of the pupils' needs and leanings. 

NEW METHODS OF INDIVIDUALIZING 

For anything of this kind, we are, of course, 
in need of an adaptation of the general or- 
ganization of the schools. It is with the ut- 
most satisfaction that we note the recent 
"progress towards individualizing education and 
the cultivation of the child's real assets, A 
great step in advancing healthy-mindedness 
is no doubt being attained by providing more 
and more individual treatment for each boy 
and girl. I need not speak of the Gary sys- 
tem. No doubt you also have your own 
experiments in your midst. Frederick Burk 
of the California State Normal School at San 
Francisco has published, not mere pamphlets 
of propaganda as the titles might suggest : 
**Lock-step Schooling and a Remedy," 1913; 
and "Every child vs. Lock-step Schooling, a 
Suit in Equity," published in 1915; not a 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 139 

mere appeal, but a record of "data of two 
years ' experience in the operation of a system 
of individual instruction showing accelerated 
rates of pupils' progress, elimination of wastes 
of school time, actual saving in cost of school- 
ing, and adaptability to various schools." 

He adds, possibly too categorically : *' There 
are no misfit children. There are misfit 
schools, misfit texts and studies, misfit dogmas 
and traditions of pedants and pedantry. There 
are misfit homes, misfit occupations and diver- 
sions. In fact, there are all kinds and condi- 
tions of misfit clothing for children, but — in 
the nature of things there can be no misfit 
children." We may admit that some children 
are misfits, but the community will have to 
recognize the need of special provision. 

Another experiment interests me especially 
because it comes from a center in which I 
hope to be given an opportunity to help in 
the realization of the dream of a school as a 
community center described in its broad out- 
line in the Survey of September 18, 1915. 

In a plan of cooperation between the Public 
School and Children's Playground Associa- 
tion, the Public Park Board and the Paret 
Memorial (which loaned its gymnasium in 
inclement weather), "to keep well children 



140 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

well," Miss Persis K. Miller, of School No. 76 
on Locust Point, Baltimore, started, in the 
fall of 1913, an experiment at liberalization 
of the school with the knowledge of Assistant 
Superintendent Hands and the chairman of 
the Committee on Rules of the Board of 
Education — with the clear understanding 
that it was to be a carefully supervised 
experiment. 

She chose one hundred children, or two of 
the four first grades the first year ; the follow- 
ing years two hundred children, or the four 
first grades. 

The following is the plan of the day's 
work : All the children report at school 
for morning exercises, attendance roll, etc. 
The children in each room are divided into 
three groups. After the morning exercises 
two of the three groups go to the playground. 
The group remaining with the classroom 
teacher, about sixteen in number, has the 
concentrated attention of the teacher for one 
hour. Then a fresh group is brought from 
the playground and the classroom group is 
taken to the playground. Children are thus 
spending about one third time in the class- 
room and two thirds on the playground 
under supervised play. 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 141 

The results ? The health is noticeably im- 
proved. There is less than one half of the 
absences formerly noted on account of illness. 
As to progress in school, — the grading of 
these primary children being based on read- 
ing, — the children under this plan have 
read from three to four times as much as 
under the old plan. 

After the first year the experiment had to 
be suspended for one month ; but the school 
board finally accepted the demonstration. 
The first four grades are now using the plan. 
The playground teacher employs four 
teachers-in-training from the Baltimore 
Teachers' Training School. 

What all this means is obvious. The child 
like the grown-up needs action. The child 
needs a chance to do in the best way that which 
he has to learn to do. If we made sure that 
one half of the time of our schools was de- 
voted to activity with demonstrable results, 
and not only to athletic competitions of a 
few, I feel certain that the college-trained 
man and woman would less frequently make the 
statement that they have to learn how to work 
when they come to the professional school, 
and would less frequently exhibit a remark- 
able incapacity to look for facts, to ask ques- 



142 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

tions, and to assert well-trained curiosity and 
imagination and a willingness to try things and 
to harmonize school and life. 

Miss Miller, the principal under whose direc- 
tion the experiment described above was 
carried out, tells me that one of the greatest 
perplexities of the parents is that when the 
children leave school they do not know where 
to turn and what work to take up. As the 
remedy, the parents appeal for vocational 
training. Give the pupils some things to do 
with their hands, including even some duties 
about the schoolhouse; ask some people in 
the community to give them an occasional 
demonstration of what the various trades 
actually are and how grown-ups live and work ; 
and see to it that each school has its work- 
shop for those who prove capable of work 
that brings concrete results and a satisfying 
sense of having achieved something worth 
while. To have a chance to do work of this 
character is certainly better than having to 
earn a penny as a newspaper "middleman." 

The child needs less repression and more 
guiding in activity. Ostwald's "Imperative 
of Energetics" with its rule, "Waste no free 
energy ; treasure it and make the best use 
of it," is one of the most important principles 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 143 

of education. Direct children to use their 
free energy by cultivation of habits and by 
training in the use of initiative. Do not cul- 
tivate weariness ; do not smooth over weari- 
ness by mere overstimulation; but see that 
the child often enough uses all his energies 
with a full expression of all his capacity. 

If the pupils can be led to develop their 
opportunities, to shape their ends and aims 
according to their means, with a really full 
and wholesome use of what is available, 
there is the best chance for growth and for 
stability and a natural development of per- 
sonal and familial and community problems. 

FALSE FEARS 

We sometimes hear of a practical doubt 
as to the application of any standardization 
and individual guiding of children as con- 
flicting with parental pride and prerogatives. 
Where a really constructive interest is shown, 
we need not dread resentment on the part of 
the parents against the keeping of a record 
of facts of a personal nature, and against 
grading the children according to their fitness. 
When we begin to acknowledge many standards 
of normality, we take away the sting of a 
"stigma." The parents will feel an ever- 



144 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

lasting gratitude to him who shows them where 
their child will succeed. If the standardizing 
is not done by perfectionists, but is based 
upon the statement of facts, and if, in any 
radical demotion, the consensus of the prin- 
cipal teacher and the parent, and, if neces- 
sary, some dependable friend of the family 
and perhaps the physician, is secured, the 
parents will feel that they receive a help that 
is worth while and that meets needs very 
keenly felt at home as well as in school. 
Democracy stands for equality of opportu- 
nity, and also for recognition of individuality. 
To collect the data for the right kind of 
grading has further practical advantages. 
When I make efforts to get the school history 
of a patient, I get from schools merely an 
account of probably rather arbitrary marks — 
but an account of the principal ambitions, 
tendencies and assets ? What are the teachers 
expected to work with and to work for ? A 
system with a definite kind of order and 
routine — but more and more also a knowl- 
edge of the individual child, the home, the 
gang and other factors of the environment. 
Why should not these facts be so worked out 
into individual records that they could be- 
come available to more than one teacher? 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 145 

What can a new teacher expect to do when a 
class of from thirty to fifty Httle strangers is 
thrust upon her ? 

THE PROBLEM OF MORAL HEALTH 

I have not, so far, touched specifically 
upon the moral health of the child. It is here 
that no teacher can do himself or herself 
justice without individual records. 

On this most difficult problem of moral 
health, and its past and future, the teachers 
have but little light given them. Yet should 
not the school have its share in this respon- 
sibility ? 

The French schools, I am told, have made 
a special effort to introduce moral training 
into the curriculum, with varying reports as 
to their success. One of the most interesting 
efforts in this direction in the United States 
is that of Milton Fairchild, who has developed 
several illustrated lectures starting from ob- 
servations in the street, snapshots of all 
kinds of situations of actual child and adult 
life, and accompanied by brief explanatory 
and advisory talks. The point here, as in so 
many other points of education, is that we 
must furnish the help to the teacher, give 
material enabling him or her to meet individ- 

L 



« 



146 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

ually the many actual situations in the child's 
life, and also the questions and the temporary 
interests concerning the many matters in 
which no textbook course would hold the 
attention of the pupil. What is needed is an 
occasional general lesson, but usually more is 
attained by a concrete personal application 
or explanation. 

The school has to leave the specific recom- 
mendations and standards elastic and rela- 
tively individual. Is it not the best moral 
teaching to show the pupil how to be true 
to one's self, and yet thoughtful of a larger 
whole than one's self — the religious universe, 
the social group, and the family — and will- 
ing to give thought to special problems and 
emergencies.'^ The school must train mem- 
bers of different social and religious and in- 
tellectual strata of life, and yet bring to them 
the fundamentals of the nation's standards 
of behavior and moral principles and the 
information and habit-training which we must 
be able to expect from the average citizen. 
We must keep in mind that the school is a 
social organization supplementing the home so 
as to give each child the environment best 
suited to it, and that not so much with con- 
tinual concern for the future as for the effec- 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 147 

tiveness at the time. The school is to bring 
out the level of general training which fits 
the growing child for the demands of the give- 
and-take of a given type of community, with 
an ultimate ability to make individual de- 
cisions. Instead of pondering as to what the 
moral training and standards should be, we 
must accept frankly the fact that our stand- 
ard is the standard of behavior and moral 
principles and the information and habit- 
training exemplified by the teachers and the 
outside environment, the home and compan- 
ions. Moral training after all is, as Sumner 
puts it in his " Folkways," the training of the 
mores, of actual social habits, and is, more 
than any other line of training, a training in 
fitting together instincts and actual life. To 
discuss this here and now with regard to such 
a specific issue as the sex problem would de- 
tain you too long. (See note in the appendix.) 
No matter how we conceive the problem of 
mental and moral health, whether as a pre- 
ventive measure against the various diseases, 
or, as I would rather conceive of it, as a plan 
of educational procedure of a more immedi- 
ately and more broadly constructive nature, 
as a plan to bring out the assets of our pupils 
as true to their temporary make-up and 



148 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

opportunities as possible, — the highest aim 
of education will always lie in the proper 
encouragement and training of certain emo- 
tional assets, the interests, leanings and curiosi- 
ties, ambitions, likes and dislikes, as well as of 
purely intellectual assets or knowledge. We 
know, of course, that as soon as we come to 
thaU to the problem of poise, of interests and 
of the best assets of the personality, helpful 
guidance can be given only by the one who 
has himself or herself a reasonable mastery of 
life and of its mainsprings and forces, and 
the ability to forge crude emotional material 
into power. 

This means that the teacher must be, if not 
necessarily of the people, at least with the 
people whose childhood and growth problems 
belong to the school. The teachers, like the 
physicians, have to face many conditions that 
they like and sympathize with, and others 
that they can hardly approve of but cannot 
change and they must be able to help the 
pupil face the incongruities of life with a 
great deal of tact and sound sense. 

RESPONSIBILITIES TOWARD THE TEACHER 

This brings me to my last topic, and the 
topic, to my mind, most important for real 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 149 

progress — our responsibilities toward the 

teachers, 

Queerly enough, in the face of the great 
duty and opportunity to render a leading 
service to the nation, our country has done 
remarkably little to give full recognition to 
the body of the workers, the profession of 
teachers, by making their situation and ambi- 
tions such that they would not have to depend 
on unionism methods to secure their full share 
of recognition. 

If we wish to succeed in any program of 
mental and moral health work in schools, we 
have to give our teachers a chance to develop 
and to maintain the best in human nature, and 
to live in constant and profitable touch with 
the homes of their pupils and the community 

at large. 

The responsible work of the teacher in a 
modern individualizing school-system is of a 
kind that demands the most varied capaci- 
ties. The teacher must give the pupil an 
example of an orderly and yet plastic manage- 
ment of a daily program of planned work, 
with due justice to the many types and tem- 
peraments of pupils and with a helpful and 
sympathetic understanding of the life out- 
side of school. The teacher must be a living 



150 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

example of poise and good management and 
square dealing. 

We must therefore seriously consider be- 
ginning our work of mental and moral hygiene 
among us teachers. This is the highest task 
for the school organization. 

It is easy to see what this means as regards 
the position of the teacher in the community, 
I cannot help feeling that I know remarkably 
little of the teachers in the community in 
which I live. Wherever I have lived, I have 
met but few teachers in the circles with which 
I have most contact. This may be due to the 
undemocratic prevalence of private schools 
and their frequent remoteness from the homes 
and also due to the fact that I have but 
recently graduated into the personally in- 
terested class of parenthood. In my Swiss 
home environment the teacher had a rather 
prominent position, close to that of the 
minister and the physician, although apt 
to be at a natural disadvantage in respect 
to compensation, training and outlook. I 
nevertheless feel that the fact that so many 
young men become and remain teachers 
in Switzerland is an evidence that there 
is something that holds the ambitions and 
interests, and that inevitably with a de- 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 151 

cidedly beneficial effect on the schools and 
pupils. 

Stability, proper representation of the 
teachers in discussions of methods and poli- 
cies, the right to the freest use of their judg- 
ment in the use of the school-hours, and an 
organized collaboration with parents, will do 
a great deal towards sanitation of the atmos- 
phere. Cultivation of mutual pedagogical in- 
terests among the teachers themselves and 
among teachers and parents is to my mind 
the secret of that perennial post-graduate 
work and post-graduate growth which makes 
the live teacher. 

There is no doubt that clearness on funda- 
mentals and on the minimal standards of de- 
mands means greater freedom for the teacher, 
more personal initiative and less dependence 
on a rigid form or iron-bound rules. What 
this means to teacher and pupil, every one 
of us realizes when we call to mind the teachers 
who did and those who did not leave lasting 
impressions upon our development. Those 
who did were those whom we learned to ap- 
preciate as personalities. The question then 
comes : What are we doing towards shaping 
personalities in the ranks of the teachers ? 

This to my mind is one of the vital prob- 



152 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

lems in the educational system and one that 
calls most emphatically for the raising of 
standards of values of our entire civic and 
political system. We cannot go on taking 
out of the teacher's life everything that is 
vital and perhaps somewhat difiicult to handle, 
under the doctrine that we must avoid every- 
thing that might touch political and civic 
and religious and moral principles. We must 
encourage interest in the matters that mean 
public leadership. We have to inject the 
best we have into civics and politics so as to 
make the field less exclusively tempting to 
the mere exploiter. We must encourage more 
citizens and more teachers to take a re- 
sponsible interest in civics. When shall we 
be mature for that? Hardly as long as we 
let politics be what it is in our midst to-day. 
I believe we shall get nearer the goal when 
our schools become community centers, with 
greater freedom for, and more personal con- 
fidence in, the teacher, and when the life of 
the school child and of the educational period 
of man shall concern itself more even in the 
early periods of life with a full-fledged in- 
terest in a well-rounded existence in school 
and at large, rather than in the mere hammer- 
ing in of a set curriculum. 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 153 

With a development of school districts, 
and a community organization with the 
schools as centers, we shall inject vital in- 
terests and contacts which will enliven the 
ideals and the practical meaning of the 
teacher's work. 

To come back to a previous topic : When I 
ask myself when, in what part of the curric- 
ulum, and how should the many features 
on which health depends be taught, I become 
impressed over and over again with the fact 
that the many branches of teaching and learn- 
ing interweave tremendously. Thus the 
teaching of the mother tongue is really a part 
of all branches of elementary and later teach- 
ing. Such a feature as clearness and correct- 
ness of thinking and expression belongs to 
the nature study as well as to the lesson in 
grammar, and the accuracy, or lack of it, 
that prevails in the pupil's home and social 
atmosphere, ultimately decides how much 
grammar and accuracy of language can be 
expected at school. 

The same I feel holds for the grammar of 
conduct and behavior, the grammar of using 
one's instinctive capacities and assets and the 
available opportunities, — the grammar of 
mental and moral health. When all the 



154 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH IN A 

teachers are irabued with interest in the best 
that is to be had in the fields to be taught, 
when they know each other's methods and 
ambitions and when they are in equally live 
contact with the foundations of the com- 
munity spirit, they will find those opportuni- 
ties of group teaching and individual helps 
which are most telling in the problems of 
hygiene, — and they will help through con- 
tact with the parents to create an atmosphere 
which will help the child instead of being full 
of bewildering contradictions. 

SCHOOL BOARDS 

In view of how much depends on the teacher, 
we must realize that in every community 
there should be a most carefully chosen body 
of mediators between the inevitably greatly 
varied types of indifferent or overzealous, 
indolent or fault-finding public and the body 
of teachers who also may have their degrees 
of indifference or of zeal, their divisions of inter- 
ests and their griefs and worries. Success 
will always depend on a wise school board and 
a wise body of administrators, aiming above 
all things at a spirit dedicated to the right 
kind of efficiency, the spirit of practical ideal- 
ism among the teachers and in the community 



CONSTRUCTIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM 155 

whose educational work they have to handle. 
Here again the problem is to shape the aims 
according to the means. It may at times be 
necessary to be conservative and to refrain 
from radical steps although they may promise 
a quick attainment of the millennium; but 
the general direction should be toward such 
community organization and civic and national 
service as will make unnecessary the hysterical 
types of clamor for preparedness in the hours 
of danger and trial that from time to time are 
bound to come to any community or nation. 

REAFFIRMATIONS 

It is not startling novelties that an out- 
sider should be expected to bring into this 
type of discussion. One may be pretty cer- 
tain that many teachers and pedagogically 
inclined persons have singly and in various 
group-movements proposed and probably 
practiced the bulk of what an outsider might 
have to suggest in such a survey of the field 
from the angle of a special science. I offer 
what I have to say in all modesty as reaffir- 
mations, as emphases suggested by my special 
experiences, fully realizing that the large mass 
of experience of the professional educator is 
what will always be the biggest help for any 



156 MENTAL AND MORAL HEALTH 

constructive program. I hope we under- 
stand each other on the principle of a general 
solidarity of the health of the parts, the 
health of the individual and the health of 
the group ; on the advantages we may derive 
from using the experiences of psychopathology 
and its methods, on the advantages of records 
which help us standardize pupils and bring 
teacher and parents closely together, and on 
the great desideratum of bringing the school 
into the very center of community organi- 
zation. 

John Dewey has described "The School of 
Tomorrow"; Abraham Flexner is shaping 
his "Modern School." There are in many 
school-systems " schools of to-day " — full 
of inspiration. There are evidences every- 
where of the will to grow, and of the means 
to grow, and it looks as if we had good cause 
to wish that we might be "children of to-day" 
if it were not even more fascinating to be 
active workers for mental and moral health 
in our educational and civic world. 



THE PERSISTENCE OF PRIMARY-GROUP 
NORMS IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 
AND THEIR INFLUENCE IN OUR ED- 
UCATIONAL SYSTEM 



BY 

WILLIAM I. THOMAS 

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 



THE PERSISTENCE OF PRIMARY- 
GROUP NORMS IN PRESENT-DAY 
SOCIETY AND THEIR INFLUENCE 
IN OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM 

In his treatment of the infantile emotions 
Professor Watson suggested that we have 
greatly overstated the number of the original 
emotional reactions, and he is inclined to 
reduce them to three types — those connected 
with fear, those connected with rage and those 
connected with joy or love. 

In a study of a particular immigrant group 
(the Poles) I have found that human behavior 
seems to represent four fundamental types 
of interests or wishes — those connected with 
the desire for new experience, those connected 
with the desire for mastery, those connected 
with the desire for recognition, and those 
connected with the desire for safety or se- 
curity, — recognizing of course that all forms 
of behavior can eventually be reduced to the 
two fundamental appetites, food-hunger and 
sex-hunger, the one necessary to preserve the 

159 



160 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

life of the individual and the other necessary 
to preserve the life of the species. 

It would perhaps be fanciful to assume that 
all interest could be reduced to terms of 
organic motion — physiological expansion in 
rage and joy, physiological contraction in 
fear, — as the physicists reduce all reality 
to velocity and changes in velocity, — but 
actually we find the development of emotional 
states and of intelligence directly connected 
with the power of movement in space. 
Broadly speaking, the vegetable and the 
animal differ in their organic economy in 
the fact that the vegetable is stationary and 
has to rely for the satisfaction of its hunger 
and reproductive needs on what is present 
in the soil and what comes to it or falls to it 
(in the way of pollen or rain), while the 
animal, through the power of motion, seeks 
its food and its mate by the exploration of a 
wide region. It was Professor Mead, I be- 
lieve, who defined the animal as a mechanism 
for utilizing a non-nutrient environment as 
means of reaching a nutrient environment. 

If now the experimenter takes an animal 
as subject, say the rat, brings him to the 
proper point of hunger and places him before 
a box containing food, the actions of the 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 161 

animal become frantic; he pushes, climbs 
over, burrows under, bites the box until his 
random movements strike the combination 
and he solves the problem — perhaps by pull- 
ing a string and standing at the same moment 
on a platform inserted in the floor. Simi- 
larly, if the rat is placed before a maze con- 
taining food and representing one chance in 
twenty of going right, he will begin the same 
frantic and random pursuit, finally locating 
the food through the elimination of errors. 
Or if you follow him into the open the 
dominant activity will be pursuit, varied by 
flight. 

And in this connection I think we must 
conclude that just as the whole physical 
mechanism of the animal is adapted largely 
to motion, to pursuit, so the dominant interest ' 
is a pursuit interest, and the mental pattern 
or schema is essentially a hunting of pur- 
suit pattern. And we must note that the 
reproductive activities fall into this scheme 
also, for pairing among animals and human 
marriage are a process of pursuit and capture. 

Turning now abruptly from the rat to the 
creative man, any one who studies the history 
of a practical invention or a scientific dis- 
covery will be impressed with the resemblance 

M 



162 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

between the activities of the human being 
before his problem and those of the rat be- 
fore his box or maze. For some years, in 
fact, I have been in the habit of pointing out 
that scientific pursuit is precisely of the hunt- 
ing pattern. The intensity interest on the part 
of the discoverer or experimenter, his random 
and frenzied movements, his following of every 
scent, his abandonment of false trails, his 
elation when he has got his result, remind 
us of the animal in quest of his prey and 
after he has made his kill. The whole scien- 
tific life of such men as Pasteur, Goodyear, 
Helmholtz, Mayer, is a pursuit of ideas, either 
a series of quests or one long quest, ending 
perhaps with success and exhaustion. Per- 
mit me to cite a single illuminating example 
from the life of Pasteur. 

Pasteur's first scientific success was in the 
study of crystallization, and in this connection 
he became particularly interested in racemic 
acid. But this substance, produced first by 
Kestner in 1820 as an accident in the manu- 
facture of tartaric acid, had in 1852 ceased to 
appear, in spite of all efforts to obtain it. 
Pasteur and his friend Mitscherlich sus- 
pected that the failure to get it was due to 
the fact that the present manufacturers of 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 163 

tartaric acid were using a different tartar. 
The problem became then to inspect all the 
factories producing tartaric acid and finally 
to visit the sources from which the tartars 
came. This was the quest, and the impa- 
tience which Pasteur showed to begin it 
reminds us of a hound tugging at the leash. 
He asked Biot and Dumas to obtain for him 
a commission from the Ministry, or from the 
Academic, but exasperated by the delay he 
was on the point of writing directly to the 
President of the Republic. ''It is," he said, 
"a question that France should make it a 
point of honor to solve through one of her 
children." Biot counselled patience and 
pointed out that it was not necessary to 
"set the government in motion for this." But 
Pasteur would not wait. "I shall go to the 
end of the world," he said. "I must discover 
the source of racemic acid," and started in- 
dependently. I will excuse you from follow- 
ing the quest in detail, but in a sort of diary 
prepared for Mme. Pasteur he showed the 
greatest eagerness to have her share the joy 
of it. He went to Germany, to Vienna, to 
Prague, studied Hungarian tartars. "Finally," 
he said, "I shall go to Trieste, where I shall 
find tartars of various countries, notably 



164 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

those of the Levant, and those of the neigh- 
borhood of Trieste itself. ... If I had money 
enough I would go to Italy. ... I shall give 
ten years to it if necessary." And after eight 
months he sent the following telegram: "I 
transform tartaric acid into racemic acid. 
Please inform M. Dumas and Senarmont." ^ 
He had made his kill. 

Without citing further cases, I think it is 
apparent that the hunting activity, whether 
of animal or man, and the scientific activity 
of the creative man are singularly alike. And 
the point of interest for us is that no activity 
is interesting unless it follows the pursuit 
pattern. With reference to pleasurable and 
displeasurable work, obviously the more nearly 
the hunting scheme is followed the more 
vivid the interest. Those forms of work are 
irksome in which the interest of pursuit is 
dropped out, either because the constant rep- 
etition of the process leaves nothing of the 
problematical or because, through the divi- 
sion of labor, the problem is destroyed by 
breaking it into fragments. Society has be- 
come so complicated and artificial that it is 
hard for the individual to preserve a type of 
occupational activity of the naturalness, spon- 

» Cf. Vallery-Radot, R., Life of Pasteur, 61 ff. 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 165 

taneity and interest corresponding to the 
hunting schema. This is most perfectly pre- 
served in the various games, which are all 
typical and integral pursuits, and in the 
favored occupations — scientific research, 
business enterprise, legal and medical callings 
~ while hard labor represents the residuum 
after the interesting problems have been ab- 
stracted. 

Now the pursuit, by both the rat and Pas- 
teur, embodies, in my terminology, the desire 
for new experience and the desire for mastery. 
The incipient stage of the pursuit, or the gen- 
eral preparatory condition, is called curiosity. 
The animal must be interested in what is 
going on about him. If a noise, a movement, 
an approaching object were ignored, this 
might involve serious consequence of two kinds : 
he might miss the chance of pursuit and food, 
or he might, by failure to be alert, be made 
the object of pursuit, might be eaten. Con- 
sequently the animal is always alert, always 
getting information with reference to possible 
action. This expresses itself in the endless 
exploration of the situation by the child — 
the general exploration with the hands and 
eyes, putting things into the mouth, tasting 
and biting, attentive behavior to novel ob- 



166 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

jects, cautious approach and retreat, etc. — 
and in adults in watching one another and 
gossiping, in the aimless wanderings of the vaga- 
bond, and in the useful "curiosity" of the 
scientific man. It is a fortunate fact that this 
curiosity becomes a desire for new experience 
in the abstract, enabling the mind to take an 
acute interest in any problem — whatever — 
in scientific pursuits. 

What I have called the desire for mastery 
or the will to power, is one of the by-phenom- 
ena of anger or rage. The gloating over the 
object of successful pursuit, as shown in the 
playing of the cat with the mouse, and in the 
tendency of the child to tease, to bully, tor- 
ment, pounce upon, tear to pieces; in the 
swagger, the strut, the glare of triumph or 
defiance; in gestures, yells and actual at- 
tacks ; ^ later in the desire for ownership, 
the tendency to control every act of others, 
dictatorial, censorious and unbearable be- 
havior — exerted by man more actively and 
woman more passively, by the latter to the 
degree of having her own way even by simu- 
lation of weakness or sickness — and finally 
in lust for power, tyranny, political despot- 
ism, and in ''ambition," called by Milton 

1 Of. Thorndike, E. L., The Original Nature of Man, 92, et passim. 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 167 

"the last infirmity of noble mind" — the one 
that survives as long as he does. 

If the animal or the man, the rat or Pas- 
teur, were not a member of a society, the ac- 
tivities I have been indicating would have no 
moral quality, would be neither moral nor 
immoral. For the sake of limiting our prob- 
lem we will drop the rat at this point, but 
in fact both animals and men do live in socie- 
ties, in combinations whose meaning is a 
common struggle against death, against ex- 
ternal enemies and internal disharmonies. 
The great common desire of a human society 
is therefore to remain solidary, and it accom- 
plishes this by the formation of a code of 
behavior. In a society, the same act is good 
or bad, organizing or disorganizing, accord- 
ing to its meaning for the welfare of the whole 
group. Thus, the desire for mastery may 
express itself in furious and sadistic rage and 
murder and pillage, and is immoral, disorgan- 
izing and criminal when directed against the 
members of one's own society, but becomes 
courage, patriotism, heroism and virtue when 
turned against outsiders, in the protection 
of women and children, of the state. 

The code therefore represents the judg- 
ment of society on the activities of its mem- 



168 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

bers, it dictates the limits within which the 
desires may find expression, and it is devel- 
oped by a method which we may call "the 
definition of the situation." This defining of 
the situation is begun by the parents in the 
form of ordering and forbidding and informa- 
tion, is continued in the community by means 
of gossip, with its praise and blame, and is 
formally represented by the school, the law, the 
church. Of course morality and immorality, 
organization and disorganization, are relative 
terms ; what would be considered disorganiza- 
tion in one society would not be considered so 
in another — it is perfectly good organization 
to kill your parents in Africa because they 
wish to reach the next world while still 
young enough to enjoy it — and so the code 
will differ widely in different communal, 
national and racial groups, but will usually 
define truthfulness, honesty, obedience, clean- 
liness, unselfishness, kindliness, industry, econ- 
omy, politeness, courage, chastity, the ten 
commandments, the golden rule, "women 
and children first," respect to the aged, etc., 
in terms of positive appreciation. 

Moreover, when the code has been defined, 
no matter what its content, its violation 
provokes an emotional protest from society 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 169 

designed to be painfully felt by the offender, 
and it is so felt, owing to the dependence of the 
member on society for safety and recognition, j 
The epithets, '* coward," "traitor," ''thief," 
*' bastard," ''heretic," "scab," etc., are brief 
definitions designed to be felt as painful. And 
the effect of these definitions is deeper than 
we suspect. Many of our profound disgusts, 
for example, those connected with cannibal- 
ism and incest, are so developed — that is, 
they are highly emotionalized institutional 
products. And all codified acts, even those 
of no intrinsic importance, become eventually 
saturated with emotion. It is a matter of no 
intrinsic importance whether you carry food 
to the mouth with the knife or the fork, 
but the situation has been defined in favor 
of the fork, with grave emotional and social 
consequences — disgust and social ostracism. 
In short, any definition, however arbitrary, 
that is embodied in the habits of the people 
is regarded as right. It was, for instance, 
a custom to burn women in India on the death 
of their husbands, and to strangle them in the 
Fiji islands, and any widow would demand 
this privilege although she did not wish it. 
The contrary behavior would mean social 
death. 



170 PRIIMAEY-GROUP NORMS 

According to Mr. Pearce, there were in 
Bengal alone about 1200 suttees annually, 
and when (in 1832) Lord William Bentinck 
passed an act forbidding them, a petition was 
sent to the Privy Council signed by 18,000 
people, many of them representing the best 
families in Calcutta, asking that this prac- 
tice might be allowed to continue. In Vai- 
tupu, of the Ellice Archipelago, *' infanticide 
was ordered by law," and only two children 
were allowed to a family. In the Solomon 
Islands it was the practice to kill all (or nearly 
all) the children and buy others from neigh- 
boring islands, the idea being the same as in 
the case of the farmer among ourselves who 
sells his young calves to the butcher and buys 
yearlings. The Skposy sect of Russia sexu- 
ally mutilates all its members, and since they 
have no children they also recruit from the 
neighbors, by missionary efforts. Another 
sect, the "Child-killers," devotes itself to 
strangling new-born before they are contami- 
nated by this world. From Tarnopol there 
was reported in 1882 a sort of communal 
death. Twenty-two persons, men, women 
and children, were immured and suffocated 
by their own arrangement in order to escape 
the census, which they conceived as a device 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 171 

of Antichrist to get their names on his list 
and damn their souls. In Japan, under lye- 
yasu, a death penalty was attached to "other- 
than-expected behavior." Not smiling when 
reproved by a superior, and smiling too 
broadly when addressing a superior were forms 
of other-than-expected behavior. The smile 
had to be carefully regulated ; to expose the 
molars was fatal. 

And we are not to regard these examples 
as merely curious or disgusting — slavery, 
duelling, burning of witches are examples 
of practices coming within the definition of 
moral acts in our own past — but as evidence 
of the power which the communal defini- 
tions have to control behavior. Our immi- 
gration problem and our criminal problem 
are not mainly questions of inherent mental 
and moral worth, but questions of the atti- 
tudes and norms of behavior established by 
definitions of the situation. 

We are in the habit of calling "primary 
groups" those societies which through kin- 
ship, isolation, voluntary adhesion to cer- 
tain systems of definitions, secure an emo- 
tional unanimity among their members. By 
virtue of their unanimity the mob and the 
jury are also momentary primary groups. 



172 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

Clear examples of the primary group are 
the South Slavonian zadruga and the Russian i 
mir. When there arises in these communi- 
ties the necessity of defining a new situation, 
it is not even sufficient to reach a unanimous 
decision ; each member must voice his opinion 
and agreement, make it explicit. Cases are 
recorded where in a conflict between the tradi- 
tional communal definition (say of poverty) 
and that of the great state, a member has 
appeared before the communal assembly, sus- 
tained by the confidence in a new and author- 
itative definition, only to wither and collapse 
before the white scorn of a solidary group. 
If a member is stubborn his family members 
and close friends weep, embrace, implore — 
beg him not to disgrace them and his com- 
munity by showing the neighbors that they 
cannot agree. It has been remarked by 
students of the mir that boys six or eight years 
of age speak and act like grown men. They 
repeat the standard definitions of "our com- 
munity," "our people." 

The savage tribe is another example of the 
primary group. It was once imagined and 
is still popularly believed that the savage 
is the freest person in the world, but ethnolo- 
gists know that savage life is regulated by an 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 173 

almost incredibly minute and rigoristic code. 
The native Australian boy is permitted to 
speak to certain persons (mother-in-law, older 
sister, younger sister, etc.) only at cer- 
tain specified distances — a hundred yards, 
thirty yards, ten yards. During a period last- 
ing from ten to twenty or even thirty years, 
he is taken by the old men through a series 
of intermittent ceremonies, some single periods 
lasting as long as four months, with dra- 
matic ceremonies — as many as five or six in a 
single day and night — and oral drill, defining 
all possible situations of tribal life, and with 
a result which I can only indicate by saying 
that, as to marriage, he is related to a girl 
(among the Arunta) by a ceremony called 
tualcha mura for which we have no parallel, 
but which means not that he marries the girl 
but that he eventually marries the daughter 
of the girl when the latter has married another 
man and has a marriageable daughter, and 
that, as to food, he will not only not eat 
certain foods but believes that if he does 
this he will die, and in some cases actually 
does die. 

The Polish peasant uses a word, oJcolica, 
"the neighborhood round about," "as far as 
the report of a man reaches," and this may 



174 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

be taken as the natural external limit of the 
size of the primary group — as far as the re- 
port of a member reaches, — so long as men 
have only primary means of communication. 
But with militancy, conquest and the forma- 
tion of the great state we have a systematic 
attempt to preserve in the whole population 
the solidarity of feeling characterizing the 
primary group. The great state cannot pre- 
serve this solidarity in all respects — there 
is the formation of series of primary groups 
within the state — but it develops author- 
itative definitions of "patriotism," "treason," 
etc., and the appropriate emotional attitudes 
in this respect, so that in time of crisis, of war, 
where there is a fight of the whole nation 
against death, we witness, as at this moment, 
the temporary reconstitution of the attitudes 
of the primary group. 

Similarly, in the great religious systems 
such as Christianity and Mohammedanism, we 
have a systematic attempt to make the whole 
world a primary group, to win men away from 
the merely communal, human and worldly 
definitions (or to reaffirm these) by a system 
of definitions having a higher value through 
their divine derivation. God is the best de- , 
finer of situations because he possesses more/ 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 175 

knowledge and more prestige than any man 
or any set of men and his definitions tend to 
have finahty, absoluteness and arbitrariness 
and to convey the maximum of prepossession. 
How rigid and particularistic these defini- 
tions became at one time in the western world 
it would be superfluous to point out, especially 
if you are acquainted with the Westminster 
Catechism, but perhaps you did not know 
that Dr. Lightfoot, vice-chancellor of Cam- 
bridge University, announced at one time that 
"man was created by the Trinity on the 23rd 
of October, 4004 B.C., at 9 o'clock in the morn- 
ing," stating that the height of Adam was 
123 feet 9 inches, that of Eve 118 feet and 

9 inches. 

In the Mohammedan world, as in the Puri- 
tan world, there was an effort to define every 
present situation in terms of the past. " There 
are," says Lane, "some Muslims who will not 
do anything that the Prophet is not recorded 
to have done, and who particularly abstain 
from eating anything that he did not eat, 
though its lawfulness is undoubted. The 
Imam Ahmad Ibn-Hambal would not even 
eat watermelons, because, although he knew 
that the prophet ate them, he could not 
learn whether he ate them with or without the 



176 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

rind, or whether he broke, bit, or cut them. 
And he forbade a woman, who questioned him 
as to the propriety of the act, to spin by the 
Hght of the torches passing in the street 
by night, which were not her own property, 
because the Prophet had not mentioned 
whether it was lawful to do so, and was not 
known ever to have availed himself of a light 
belonging to another person without that 
person's leave." 

But I do not wish to leave the impression 
that definitions are dependent for their va- 
lidity on their authoritative source. All usual 
and habitual practices are emotionalized, be- 
come behavior norms, and tend to resist 
change. The iron plow-share, invented late 
in the 18th century, was strongly condemned 
on the ground that it was an insult to God, 
therefore poisoned the ground and caused 
the weeds to grow ; and until recently the old 
farmer laughed at the soil-analysis of the city 
chemist. The man who first built a water- 
driven saw-mill in England was mobbed ; the 
English war department informed the inventor 
of the first practical telegraphic device that 
it had no use for that contrivance ; in the last 
generation there was a persistent opposi- 
tion to the introduction of stoves and organs 



IN^ PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 17-7 

into churches, and if we omit recent years, 
and in recent years only the scientific and 
practical fields, it would be diflBcult to find a 
single innovation that has not encountered 
opposition and ridicule. . 

The whole problem of culture hinges on the V 
relation of the individual to society. Each 
is an indispensable value to the other. The 
whole fund of instrumental values through 
which the individual realizes his desires and 
achieves his creative activities is provided by 
society, while the type of social organization, 
the variety of the cultural content, the ra- 
pidity of social change, the creation of particu- 
lar values, depend on the individual. But the_j 
nature of the individual, demanding a maxi- 
mum of new experience, is in fundamental 
conflict with the nature of society, demand- 
ing a maximum of stability, and it would be 
interesting to analyze the various particular 
effects of the repressive action of society on 
the individual — the psychic wounds which 
confront the psychiatrist, the complete and 
masochistic resignation expressed in the 
hymn-books ("Lead, kindly Light, amid the 
encircling gloom"), the sullen repression of 
rage during a whole lifetime, represented by 
Jean Meslier, curate of Epigny, who left at 

N 



178 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

his death in 1733 a testament in which he 
declared that he had never beUeved a word 
of his teachings and that his ardent wish was 
that the ''last king might be hung with the 
entrails of the last priest," the meticulous 
manipulation of scientific data, represented 
by the Egyptologist Wilkinson who falsified 
the dates from the monuments to fit the 
accepted date of the flood, the alternating 
violation of the definition and confession of 
error, represented by Galileo and the army 
of recanters, the straining of the definition 
to include the desire for new experience, 
represented by those geologists who at one 
time reconciled geological time with the Bibli- 
cal account of creation by assuming six days, 
indeed, but extremely long ones, or by the 
plea which I read some years ago (1910) in 
the Vienna Neue Freie Presse for the legal 
toleration of incineration of the dead, based 
not upon sanitary grounds or those of individ- 
ual liberty, but upon the claim that "burial" 
as used by the church authorities did not mean 
"depositing the body in the ground," but any 
disposition of it, etc. 

But as general result of this conflict we have 
the development of three types of individual, 
dependent on the different temperamental dis- 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 179 

positions and on the degree and steadiness of 
the pressure exercised by the given social 
organization. These we may call the philis- 
tine, the bohemian and the creative man.^ 
The philistine is the individual who adapts 
his activities completely to the prevailing defi- 
nitions and norms ; he chooses security at 
the cost of new experience and individuality. 
The bohemian is unable to fit into any frame, 
social or personal, because his life is spent in 
trying to escape definitions and avoid sup- 
pressions instead of building up a positive 
organization of ends and attitudes; he has 
avoided philistinism at the cost of character 
and success, because he had a strong personal 
tendency to revolt against social pressures or 
because the pressures were not strong or con- 
sistent enough. The philistine and the bohe- 
mian are produced by the social effort to im- 
pose upon the individual a life-organization 
and to mold his character without regard to 
his personal tendencies and the line of his 
spontaneous development, and both are rela- 
tive failures. 

In contrast with these two types, the phil- 
istine tending to accept all the definitions and 
the bohemian tending to reject all of them, 
the creative man reconciles his desire for new 



180 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

experience with the desire of society for stabil- 
ity by redefining situations and creating new 
norms of a superior social value. He disorgan- 
izes the old system momentarily, but provides 
the elements for a more eflScient organiza- 
tion. The creative man and the criminal 
are equally violators of the norms, disorderly 
individuals from the standpoint of the pri- 
mary group, but in the creative man this dis- 
orderliness is expressed in the setting and 
solution of problems, in the creation of new 
values, while in the criminal it is merely 
negative — destructive of the existing system. 
All of these types except the philistine repre- 
sent individualization in the fact that they 
reject existing norms, but the individualism 
of the creative man is an intermediary stage 
between one system of values and another; 
his function is to produce changes in the social 
order corresponding to favorable variations 
in biology. 

Professor Watson emphasized the mean- 
ing of higher levels of efficiency, and higher 
levels of social efficiency are reached through 
the individualization of function represented 
best by the scientific specialization of our time. 
Individualization is a relative term — the in- 
dividual always remains incorporated in some 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 181 

world of ideas — but practically the creative 
man secures sufficient individualization to do 
his work, retains enough recognition to keep 
him sane, by escaping from the censure of one 
group into the appreciation of another group. 
And this escape seems to go on at a rate cor- 
responding with the increased facility of 
communication. The world has become 
greatly diversified, containing not only races 
and nationalities with differing norms and 
cultural systems, but various worlds of ideas 
represented by various scientific, religious, 
artistic circles ; and by the fact of reading 
alone the individual can associate himself 
with those persons or circles pre-adapted to 
his ideas, and form with them a solidary 
group. 

It does not follow, therefore, that the 
creative man is a temperamental rebel. He 
may even be a philistine at heart. Charles 
Darwin was not a rebellious person ; he was 
simply engrossed in a pursuit, and was very 
timorous about it. In common with his natu- 
ralist friends he had long realized that some- 
thing terrible was about to happen to the 
Old Testament, but when he finally had the 
proofs that species were not immutable he 
wrote to his friends that it was '*like confess- 



182 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

ing murder," and in spite of the appreciation 
of the scientific world he felt deeply to the 
end of his life the censure of the religious- 
primary group which accused him of a de- 
termination to "hunt God out of the world." 
Dr. Meyer pointed out in his lecture that we 
must learn to appreciate the varying standards 
of normality. We recognized already that 
there are varying standards of abnormality, 
and I assume that if individualization were 
so complete as to remove its subject from 
participation in any world of common ideas 
whatever, this would be a form of insanity. 
The case of Julius Robert Mayer, discoverer 
of the law of the conservation of energy, 
is almost a case of this kind, for he did not 
succeed in associating himself sympatheti- 
cally with the set of men preadapted to his 
idea — Joule indeed tried to plunder him 
and Helmholtz ridiculed him as a *' lucky 
guesser" — and at the same time he re- 
mained in his narrowly provincial Heilbronn, 
where he was treated as the town fool, accused 
of the delusion of grandeur, forcibly handled 
in two insane asylums. Even toward the end 
of his life, after he had received generous rec- 
ognition from Tyndall and also from Helm- 
holtz, he regarded himself as insane in his 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 183 

home town. When During wished to visit 
him he refused to receive him in Heilbronn, 
but arranged to meet him in the neighboring 
Wildbad, saying that a visit to his home would 
excite unfavorable comment. "Since every- 
one here," he wrote, ''regards me as a fool, 
everyone considers himself justified in exer- 
cising a spiritual guardianship over me." 

But we are not to regard creative activity 
and changes in the norms as associated solely 
with creative individuals or even with design. 
The work of the Chicago Vice Commission 
illustrates the contrary fact. This was not a 
radical body, its "representative" character 
precluded this. Indeed it explicitly stated 
its policy of including its activities within 
the existing norms. We read in the intro- 
duction to its report : " [The Commission] has 
kept constantly in mind that to offer a con- 
tribution of any value such an offering must 
be, first, moral ; second, reasonable and prac- 
tical; third, possible under the constitu- 
tional powers of our courts; fourth, that 
which will square with the public conscience 
of the American people." 

Nevertheless the work of this commis- 
sion unwittingly resulted in the modification 
of two norms, namely, "circulation of infor- 



184 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

mation about sexual matters illegal," and 
*' research into sexual matters taboo." The 
post office declared the report obscene litera- 
ture, and the members of the commission were 
technically liable to penitentiary sentence. 
The Postmaster General revoked this de- 
cision, thus modifying one norm, and the 
participation of a large body of respectable 
citizens in a research into sexual questions 
tended to bring such research under a new 
norm. But I have speculated on the fate 
of the individual who might have perpetrated 
this report single-handed. 

But why, we may ask, if a society is orderly 
and doing very well, is it desirable to disturb 
the existing norms at all. "Little man, why 
so hot ! " And this question reduces itself ulti- 
mately to a basis of idealism. It becomes a 
question of happiness, of the degree of fulfill- 
ment of wishes within the society, and on the 
other hand of levels of efiiciency as between 
societies in the ultimate struggle against 
death — as in the present war. The Arunta 
society is surpassed in orderliness only by the 
ants and other animal societies, where every 
act is predefined once and forever in terms 
of organic structure and external situation. 
The Chinese society represents a high degree 



m PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 185 

of stability on a relatively high level of culture. 
"Amuse them, tire them not, let them not 
know," is one of the oldest Chinese poUtical 

maxims. 

Now, the superior level of culture reached 
by the western world is due to a tendency to 
disturb norms, — introduced first into the 
material world by the physicists and grad- 
ually extending itself in connection with the 
theory of evolution to the biological world, 
and just now beginning to touch the human 
world. And this tendency to disturb norms 
becomes an end in itself in the form of scien- 
tific pursuits whose aim is the redefinition of 
all possible situations and the establishment 
eventually of the most general and universal 
norms, namely scientific laws. And the suc- 
cess of this method from the standpoint of 
efficiency is shown in the wonderful advance 
in material technique resulting from research 
for law in the fields of physics and chemistry, 
exemplified, for example, in mechanical in- 
ventions and modern medicine. 

But up to the present we are working in 
the social world with norms developed either 
by the method of " ordering-and-forbidding," 
or by that of empirical, communal "common- 
sense," and our level of efficiency in this 



186 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

field remains relatively low. The main pur- 
pose of what I have said up to this point was 
to show that "human behavior norms" are 
not only very arbitrary, but, precisely be- 
cause behavior norms, so highly emotional- 
ized that they claim to be absolutely right 
and final and subject to no change and no 
investigation. Moreover, every norm claims 
to be the norm, the normal, and any depar- 
ture from it is abnormal. And eventually 
every practical custom or habit, every moral, 
political, religious view claims to be the norm 
— not to recognize, in Dr. Meyer's phrase, 
the varying standards of normality — and 
to treat as abnormal whatever does not agree 
with it. In practice, as I have shown by 
examples, a social technique based upon a 
rigid system of norms tends to suppress all 
the social energies which seem to act in a way 
contrary to the norm, and to ignore all the 
social energies not included in the norm. 
Furthermore, the norms do change, in spite 
of the emotional prepossessions ; traditions 
and customs, morality, religion, and educa- 
tion undergo an increasingly rapid evolu- 
tion, and it is evident that a system pro- 
ceeding on the assumption that a certain norm 
is valid finds itself absolutely helpless when it 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 187 

suddenly realizes that the norm has lost all 
social significance and some other norm has 
appeared in its place. 

The classical example of the decay of old 
norms in an evolving society and their per- 
sistence in doctrine and practice after they 
are dead is that of "classical studies as learn- 
ing norm. ' ' Granting that these studies placed 
us at one time in the possession of cultural 
values superior to those contributed by the 
stream of Semitic influence, granting, if you 
please, with Sir Henry Maine that "nothing 
moves in the modern world that is not Greek 
in its origin," recognizing also that in a hier- 
archized society they retained for a time an 
adventitious meaning in the prestige they 
gave to their devotees — and prestige has a 
real value as a tool for the control of the 
minds of men — these studies did eventually 
lose their value as universal "learning norms" 
in an industrial world, but they persist in our 
curricula, and their retention is justified by 
a mental process which we may call the ra- 
tionalization of an emotion. Their advocates 
wish their survival, and they rationalize the 
wish in the claim that these studies have an 
indispensable disciplinary value — a mental 
process resembling the law of magical causa- 



188 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

tion whereby the appearance of the desirable 
and the disappearance of the undesirable effect 
is decreed, or virtue is transferred from an 
object of superior value to one of inferior value 
by contagion. 

Similarly in the religious world, while the 
church has practically if not doctrinally 
abandoned the norm, ''history of the world, 
unfolding of the will of God," and is doing all 
kinds of work under the Kantian norm, 
"history of the world, fulfilling of the will of 
man," yet a minister was able to say, and 
recently, that a well-known settlement worker 
"had done more harm than all the ministers 
of Chicago could make good" because she 
was not working under his norms. 

As an example from another field I can only 
refer, without prophecy, to the retreat of 
"freedom as political norm," and of the whole 
individualistic system of norms developed in 
this country during the past two centuries, 
in the face of the present world crisis. 

All that I have said up to this point im- 
presses me, and I hope it will impress you, 
with the urgency of a more exact and sys- 
tematic study of human behavior on a scale 
and with a method comparable with those 
already provided for the physical and bio- 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 189 

logical sciences. We have a failure of the 
*' common-sense" method, not only in educa- 
tion and the relation of races and nationali- 
ties, but in connection with crime, prostitution, 
slums, insanity, abnormality, labor problems 
and all kinds of unhappiness. It is only by 
following the example of the physical sciences 
and accumulating the largest possible amount 
of secure and varied information and estab- 
lishing general and particular laws which we 
can draw on to meet any crisis as it arises 
that we shall be able to secure a control in 
the social world comparable to that obtained 
in the natural world, and to determine eventu- 
ally the kind of world we want to live in. I 
take it that the only reason we have not 
followed the path of the natural sciences 
long ago is the partially unrealized fear of 
disturbing our behavior norms. For evi- 
dently there were laws and consequently 
practices in the physical world that would 
never have been discovered by the "common- 
sense" method, and obviously the same is 
true of the social world. 

What the detailed procedure in such a 
science would be I am unable even to indicate. 
You have had examples of it in the preceding 
papers of this series, and I have referred to 



190 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

one of the main problems in the earlier part 
of this paper — the laws of the conversion 
of one attitude or prepossession into another. 
But the exact procedure could not be pre- 
dicted in this field any more than it could have 
been predicted in the fields of physics and 
chemistry. The solution of problems gives 
rise to new problems. 

And in another respect a social science must 
be upon the basis of the physical sciences — 
it must go on endlessly and without reference 
to immediate practical applicability. The 
men who were instrumental in the constitu- 
tion of the physical sciences pursued their 
problems as ends in themselves, without any 
reference to practical applicability. Their 
work was, to begin with, illegitimate anyway, 
hedonistic and disorderly, and the society 
which opposed it had no expectation of prac- 
tical applicability, but anticipated only harm- 
ful disturbance of norms. But it happened 
that these men adopted the course which in 
the end yielded the largest number of results 
of practical applicability precisely because 
they had unlimited liberty in the setting and 
solution of problems, and thereby established 
the greatest variety of laws. 

The sciences do reach a point where they 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 191 

are consciously turned in the direction of 
practical applicability, that is, they anticipate 
that by following certain directions certain 
practical results will appear (and the life of 
Pasteur is perhaps the best example of this) ; 
but the history of the sciences shows that only 
a method quite free from dependence on prac- 
tice can become practically useful in its appli- 
cations. We do not know what the future 
of science will be before it is constituted and 
what may be the applications of its dis- 
coveries before they are applied. 

As to education, I have no special compe- 
tence to speak in this field, but from being 
associated with educational methods I have 
some impressions ; and if I venture to name 
some of them, I ask you to receive them as a 
friendly communication from one universe 
of discourse to another. 

I have the conviction that the preposses- 
sions of all of us are at a given moment deeper 
than we suspect, that society is in a hyp- , 
noidal state with lucid intervals, that these 
prepossessions are the emotional result of 
behavior norms of the primary-group type, 
that educators unconsciouslv conform the 
schools to primary-group ideals, that in con- 
formity with primary-group ideals of soli- 



192 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

darity our curricula strive for uniformity 
instead of diversity, that there is a consequent 
\ disharmony between education and hfe, be- 
cause the individual no longer organizes his 
life on the basis of primary group relations, but 
the educational system prepares him to do so. 

I suspect that we should increase human 
happiness, efficiency and productivity if we 
should provide the young person with an 
adequate technique in connection with a 
limited body of informational definitions and 
place him face to face with problems. I was 
impressed with a casual remark of Mr. Dewey, 
that if it were necessary he would be willing 
to have the student forget all the informa- 
tional data imparted to him during the four 
years of college life, if he could substitute 
for this a consuming interest in something. 

I have concluded that we are so prepos- 
sessed with the idea of giving the child the 
maximum of informational data that this 
becomes an end in itself, that the mass of 
learning norms is so great that the youth 
actually passes the physiological and psy- 
chological age where he is due to erupt along 
creative lines. I am aware that in our uni- 
versities we create and find already created 
an attitude of expectancy with reference to 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 193 

definitions and systems of definitions, that 
the student is extremely reluctant to under- 
take any but approved and supervised lines 
of interest, that he brings to all problems a 
too great docility, that he grows old and cau- 
tious among the multiplicity of definitions, 
and that we have in our doctor's dissertation 
what we deserve. 

I am impressed with the fact that great 
men so frequently did their great work very 
young. Newton had discovered the law of 
gravitation, integral calculus, had made dis- 
coveries in light, had developed the binomial 
theory, at the age of 24 ; Linnaeus had his 
sexual system of plants ready at the same 
age. Ludwig, Brucke, Helmholtz, du Bois 
Reymond, were reforming physiology at the 
average age of 25. Mayer, Joule, Colding, 
Helmholtz, were all under 28 years of age 
when they did their work on the conserva- 
tion of energy. Goethe, Schiller, Byron, 
Keats, Shelley, Liebig, Sadi-Carnot, are strik- 
ing examples of creative work at an early 
age. I have reflected upon how much it 
seemed to help Shakespeare and O. Henry to 
be compelled to be in a hurry and abandon 
the conventional norms and break all the 
rules. 

o 



194 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

I think it is significant that so many crea- 
tive men were poor in school, and I cannot 
escape the conclusion that being poor in school 
was an unconscious protective device for 
escaping from a multiplicity of learning with 
no relevance to their aptitude, and that, 
in view of what was going to happen, they 
had to be the worst pupils. The chemist 
Ostwald, in his interesting book, Grosse Man- 
ner, has pointed out that the precocity of 
such men as Leibnitz and Sir William Thom- 
son would have done them no good if the 
schools had been "better " in their time. 

A learned man has been at some pains to 
determine how many men became later pro- 
ductive in literature who did not learn to 
read in childhood. I believe he did not find 
any, but it would be of interest to know how 
many became productive in literary lines 
who barely learned to read and no more — 
did not parse or diagram or etymologize or 
make comparative and historical studies in 
paragraphing. 

I recognize the importance of what we call 
general culture, of contact with various worlds 
of ideas, but I am convinced that great 
blocks of our curricula, both those represent- 
ing norms outworn but persisting through 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 195 

their emotional rationalization, and those 
representing real but not universal values, 
or values disproportionately emphasized in 
the curriculum, should be transferred to the 
region of amateur work or sport, and that 
this can be so arranged as to minister to the 
emotional needs and contribute at the same 
time to the efficiency of the individual. 

Now, whether these opinions are entirely 
justified or not, the whole of what I have said 
makes it impossible for me to wish to dis- 
parage our educational system or our educa- 
tors in comparison with our other social prac- 
tices. Indeed, if stones are to be thrown, 
the sociologist is the last man to throw them. 
It does not solve the problem to attack this 
or that weak point in our system. If I 
wanted to run amuck, I think I should not 
select the educational but the legal field for 
this purpose ; and if the legislator wanted to 
do the same thing, I think he would select the 
sociological. 

I hesitated to make those remarks about 
education because I feared you would think 
I thought they were of fundamental impor- 
tance. That would be to miss the whole point. 
The point is that we have not got a method in 
the social world. The primary group norms 



196 PRIMARY-GROUP NORMS 

are breaking down, mainly owing to the facili- 
tated communication gained through dis- 
coveries in the natural sciences and their 
practical application. The very disharmony 
of the social world is largely due to the dis- 
proportionate rate of advance in the mechani- 
cal world. We live in an entirely new world, 
unique, without parallel in history. History 
has not helped us. It cannot help us because 
we do not understand it; we do not even 
understand an election. We must first under- 
stand the past from the present. We must 
view the present as behavior. We must es- 
tablish by scientific procedure the laws of 
behavior, and then the past will have its 
meaning and make its contribution. If we 
learn the laws of human behavior as we have 
learned the laws of mathematics, physics, 
and chemistry, if we establish what are the 
fundamental human attitudes, how they can 
be converted into other and more socially 
desirable attitudes, how the world of values 
is created and modified by the operation of 
these attitudes, then we can establish any 
attitudes and values whatever. 

And we are not to speak of "ultimate" 
or "supreme" values. The ultimate value is 
the value you desire at the given moment. 



IN PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY 197 

But if your "ultimate" values mean the aboli- 
tion of war, of crime, of drink, of abnormality, 
of slums, of this or that kind of unhappiness, 
then you can secure these values, and you 
can secure whatever seem to you ''ultimate" 
values afterwards, but they cannot be se- 
cured without a science of behavior, and more 
than an "ultimate" mechanics or an "ulti- 
mate" medicine could or can be secured 
without the preceding sciences of mathemat- 
ics, physics, and chemistry. 

And, finally, if we recognize that social 
control is to be reached through the study of 
behavior, and that its technique is to consist 
in the creation of attitudes appropriate to 
desired values, then I suggest that the most 
essential attitude at the present moment is 
a public attitude of hospitality toward all 
forms of research in the social world, such 
as it has gained toward all forms of research 
in the physical world. The Chicago Vice 
Commission could not be called on to do more 
than face a penitentiary sentence. 



APPENDIX TO DR. MEYER'S 
LECTURE 

MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF MENTAL 
DISEASE 



APPENDIX TO DR. MEYER'S 
LECTURE 

MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF MENTAL 
DISEASE 

In a very readable little book of the Home 
University Library, Councilman has defined 
disease as a change produced in living beings 
in consequence of which they are no longer in 
harmony with their environment, and, we 
may add, with themselves, i.e. their past and 
their future. Certainly this conception holds 
also for those disorders which we call mental, 
because they belong to that large range of 
functions and activities in which the individual 
acts as an entity, as a personality, as a stage 
and link between his own past and future 
and as an element of society. 

The greatest diflSculty in life, the greatest 
source of disharmony, apart from the influ- 
ences of heredity, infectious disease, and poor 
feeding, and poor chances for growth, is the 
discrepancy between impulse, yearning and 
ambition on the one hand and the actual 
opportunities and the actual eflaciency of 

201 



202 APPENDIX TO DR. MEYER'S LECTURE 

performance on the other. We know of 
people who try continually to put square pegs 
into round holes. They are unwilling or 
unable to learn to know and to accept their 
own nature and the world as it is, and to 
shape their aims according to their assets. 

In a large percentage of cases in which 
persons come to grief in their mental and moral 
health, the trouble is of just that kind. Failing 
with what is frequently impossible and undesir- 
able anyhow, these persons develop emotional 
attitudes and habits and tendencies to fumble 
or to brood or to puzzle or to be apprehensive 
until what students of the functional diseases 
of the heart call "a break of compensation" 
occurs, a break of nature's system of main- 
taining the balance, with a more or less sudden 
slump and implication of collateral functions. 
In our field this is oftenest in the form of a 
declaration of a simple "minor psychosis" in 
which the patient maintains his or her general 
understanding of the situation and of human 
relations, but develops exhaustibility along 
with inability to rest, insomnia, various de- 
rangements and collisions of functions that 
should work smoothly, not only of sleep, but 
also of digestion, of the heart action, of the 
breathing, of the thyroid function — this is 



MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF DISEASE 203 

what we commonly and euphemistically speak 
of as neurasthenia with its irritable weakness. 
Or the patient develops obsessions, fear of 
death or of going insane, doubts, false feelings 
of obligation, unwarranted fear of dirt and 
infection leading to habits of washing the 
hands incessantly, and tendencies to ponder 
instead of acting, counting, saying things a 
definite number of times, etc. Or the patient 
gets into a way of paying attention to various 
queer feelings and conditions of special parts 
and organs which really are normal but become 
the scapegoat for abnormal and blundering 
conflicts and emotional states. These con- 
flicts and emotional states then are apt to rise 
to the surface as peculiar dreamy states, 
fancies, outbreaks of emotions, or even con- 
vulsions or various antics of special organs or 
functions, such as loss of power of a limb or 
joint, or peculiar attacks of vomiting, of feel- 
ings of a lump in the throat and many other 
really protean disorders. The real relation, 
however, of these manifestations to the actual 
difiiculties remains concealed from the layman 
and often actually hidden from the patient, 
as in states of hysterical amnesia, where the 
patient may not remember anything of the 
circumstances and the associative setting of 



204 APPENDIX TO DR. MEYER'S LECTURE 

the disturbance. The condition is like an 
evasion, not a real disease of the organs but a 
disorder of balance by evasion or substitution, 
a disorder of management, adaptation and 
adjustment. 

Or the patient passes into a state of depres- 
sion or the opposite, a state of elation and 
overactivity, an occasional swinging of the 
pendulum into melancholia or into hypomania 
or mania, often lasting months or even years, 
without actual damage to the brain, and usu- 
ally with ultimate recovery or at least periods 
of normal health. Or the patient may pass 
into a state of delusion in which the individual 
asserts his or her own beliefs rather than the 
judgment of a safe consensus of a group, 
either as a transitory upheaval lasting a few 
days or weeks or months, or as the kind that 
tends to vitiate the attitude for the rest of a 
life by spinning a web of false interpretations 
between the patient and reality. Sometimes 
this disorder leaves the intellectual functions 
so keen as to deceive the average person as to 
the very existence of any mental disease, but 
oftener causes a gradual perversion and de- 
terioration difficult or even impossible to arrest 
until nature reaches its own resting places of 
false balances, by no means always a com- 



MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF DISEASE 205 

plete perversion, but nevertheless often enough 
marking a lasting damage. 

A large group of these conditions of what 
we might call fantastic dilapidation constitutes 
what has been named dementia prsecox — 
by no means always a lasting condition such 
as the word dementia might indicate. My 
studies in these cases have convinced me that 
a nature difficult to understand and shut-in 
and often somewhat precocious and uneven, 
habits which tend to day-dreaming and playing 
with one's own thoughts and feelings, habit 
conflicts and drifting into mysticism and the 
like, can be traced in many cases to early 
childhood and to the school years, where they 
ought to have been recognized and helped to 
a safer equilibrium; it is especially striking 
that these disorders are relatively frequent in 
apparently very conscientious or actually over- 
conscientious individuals. Many of these 
cases are exceedingly instructive in open- 
ing one's eyes to conditions which play a 
r61e in causing minor disturbances of the 
neurasthenic, psychasthenic and hysterical 
type and to many problems which merely 
tend to reduce the efficiency of the person 
without becoming an actual disease. It is 
through these conditions that nature may 



206 APPENDIX TO DR. MEYER'S LECTURE 

make cruel experiments ; but from them man 
can learn much for the benefit of a healthier 
and more developed humanity. 

The types thus sketched naturally do not 
cover all the disorders. There are other con- 
ditions disabling our mental life, judgment 
and behavior brought about either by the 
habitual use of stimulants and false foods, 
and by infections, apt to lead to delirium or to 
various kinds of delusional states ; or by 
damage to the brain by syphilis, which has 
proved to be the cause of a most distinctive 
kind of mental disorder usually called paresis ; 
or we may deal with premature changes of the 
blood vessels or with other damage to the 
brain. Many of these are states which a mere 
knowledge of how to steer clear of risk and 
danger will fail to prevent, unless it becomes an 
ingrained part of our civilization and indi- 
vidual life. The study of alcoholism, of the 
venereal diseases and of many infectious dis- 
eases makes one realize how deeply rooted 
most occasions for disease are in the common 
soil of all the good and bad in human life, in 
the yearnings and leanings, the penchant, the 
equation of balancing factors. 

In* order to avoid any misunderstanding 
which might suggest a one-sided emphasis 



MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF DISEASE 207 

of the so-called mental psychogenic factors, 
let me emphasize that, between the disorders 
of mainly functional collisions and maladapta- 
tions and those representing more or less 
direct and palpable brain damage due to 
palpable outside causes, there are intermediate 
conditions in which vicious circles damaging 
various organs or the brain itself are estab- 
lished by emotional conflicts and bungling 
ways of trying to fit incompatibilities and by 
disregard of the strain on the various organs 
which participate in the integrated reactions 
and in the biological regulations. The studies 
by Cannon show how internal organs play an 
essential role in emotions ; we know that the 
thyroid gland can be thrown out of balance 
by emotional strains ; we know that the sex 
glands can be kept under abnormal stimula- 
tion. Thus various organs can start special 
vicious circles and cause intercurrent damage 
to functions and even to structures, by court- 
ing complications and chances for infections. 
To this survey you can readily add what 
we know of heredity and of defective develop- 
ment ; the problem of the difficult and poorly 
fitted individual, — the type on which so 
much early work is being done in Chicago, — 
whether delinquent or not delinquent, always 



208 APPENDIX TO DR. MEYER'S LECTURE 

a center of solicitude. Some of these no 
doubt are the less fortunate types of the in- 
numerable possible varieties of progeny the 
wealth of which Dr. Jennings has described ; 
some may be clearly the products of poor 
stock, but many clearly also the victims of a 
further unwillingness to fit the environment 
and the training to the case, and the case to the 
environment it is fit for. From time to time 
we find an unscrupulous magazine article 
preaching the gospel of brain operation in 
these trying cases. Most people know better ; 
only a few of these unfortunate cases present 
disorders remediable by operation or by any 
one simple trick. Experience gives no en- 
couragement to the extreme optimist nor is 
there an excuse for the pessimist who sur- 
renders to the concept of degeneracy and 
inactivity. Our present-day inquiry is bent 
on a systematic study of the working of the 
various determining factors and a search for 
those factors of adaptation which can be 
adjusted. This is beyond question the only 
method with which to reach that far larger 
matter of concern, that which will bring us, 
teacher and physician, much more frequently 
together than do the outspoken cases of 
mental disease. I refer to the innumerable 



MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF DISEASE 209 

minor lapses from the hygiene, the health 
and the eflBcient life which give us the human 
satisfactions of real growth and development. 
That an early and sensible understanding 
of the child's individual problems is a vital 
gain in shaping more wholesome lives, and 
that the problem is the same for the teacher 
and for one interested in mental hygiene, can, 
I think, readily be gleaned from the above 
sketch. 

THE PROBLEM OF SEX-EDUCATION 

No problem is more closely related to the 
nervous, mental and moral equilibrium and 
none more closely dependent on the coopera- 
tion of home and school than that of what the 
school shall do with the realities of sex-life. 
Sex-instruction without a sympathetic and 
cooperative home training is, to say the least, 
problematic. Help for the parents with an- 
swers to the many childhood questions in 
harmony with our school instruction, and, in 
turn, consideration in the school instruction 
of what the home training offers, would 
seem to create the only safe road. Naivete 
alone cannot be depended upon. There is, 
however, much to the principle that one 
should not incite interest in details which are 



p 



210 APPENDIX TO DR. MEYER'S LECTURE 

apt to lead to curiosity and experimentation. 
Cultivate confidence in the right kind of 
persons and ease of discussion, with avoidance 
of curiosity in regard to the parts which react 
with specific and stimulating sensationg ; and 
where desirable, refer the pupil to the best 
prepared or qualified person for individual 
discussion, not of generalities, but of specific 
points that the child may bring up. Efforts 
in this field are apt to be futile unless one 
has the cooperation of the parents and a knowl- 
edge of their point of view as well as the con- 
fidence of the pupil ; one should be able to 
base one's talk on the pupil's own personal 
experience, and to let one's own larger experi- 
ence merely form a background from which to 
encourage spontaneous expression and with 
which to convey a feeling of safety, with a 
minimal amount of dogmatic guidance which 
might overstimulate curiosity. There should 
be no dogma of exclusive salvation ; but a 
confidence that every individual development 
can with proper control and guidance lead 
to a natural and sane capacity to become a 
father or a mother when the conditions are 
fulfilled. 

Coeducation of boys and girls is a desidera- 
tum conditioned by the home situations and 



MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF DISEASE 211 

the social fitness of the community, and also 
by the scope of individualization in the man- 
agement of the pupils. There should be 
ample opportunities for individualization, 
especially if practical work is introduced into 
the school, and it may even be well to limit 
the number of coeducational exercises for 
certain topics and certain groups of pupils, 
without, however, attracting the attention 
to the sex-issue as such, but rather to the 
division of interests. 



Printed in the United States of America, 



